74 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



can tell me what interest you will receive on the United States 

 bonds you may have, — so much, ordered by law. But natural 

 results are as strictly under natural laws as commercial or 

 financial results are under the command of statute ; and if we 

 could only ascertain the law out of which comes the force that 

 makes the result, we should know just how to repeat the 

 result every time. The trouble in New England with all of 

 us, is, we are superficial students ; we are objective students ; 

 we look at the colt as an object ; we do not look at the colt 

 as a creation, and analyze the causes which underlie that 

 creation. How did he get his color? How did he come by 

 his temperament ? Whence did he receive that peculiar con- 

 formation of structure? Was it from his immediate parents, 

 or from his remote parents, or is there the original type in that 

 colt, — a new creation, as it were, independent of his parentage ? 

 For God, in order to preserve the finest specimens of every 

 race or tribe, occasionally repeats the original type of it. 



You have all, no doubt, known children that were so much 

 more brilliant than either father or mother, that you could not 

 say they came out of either father or mother. You have known 

 sons so much more talented and able than father or mother, 

 that they could not be called the children of either father or 

 mother. God intervened for his own wise purposes, and 

 made a new creation in that boy, and the result was a poet, or 

 musician, or orator ; a being made of so much finer stufi^than 

 ever could be reassured out of the parentage that preceded, 

 that thoughtful men say, God went back to the beginning of 

 the world for that man. Well, men are puzzled in meeting a 

 great horse bred from a dam and sire of no peculiar note ; 

 they undertake to account for that wonderful creation, as if he 

 were the result of his sire and his dam. I look at it difier- 

 ently. I give that sire no credit at all, because it is such an 

 exceptional case that it is ruled outside of the law of descent. 

 We cannot aflbrd to trust to it by way of reasoning from it. 

 A result that is so exceptional as to be unsupported by any 

 law, you cannot make the basis of any business, or rule of 

 any studentship. You bring me a fine horse, of so much 

 greater value than sire or dam that you cannot account for 

 that horse on the grouiid of parentage, and I do not try to 

 xiccount for him in that way. I do not give the sire or dam 



