104 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



&c., than in the last five years, as the great shows held in 

 our large cities go to prove. And, furthermore, your com- 

 mittee do not know of a single party who has managed to 

 raise fowls of different breeds to the feather, as we say, per- 

 fect in color, form, &c., who has not made it pay, who has 

 not made a good profit from it ; and the reason is obvious. 

 As far back as Moses, so far as we know, men of wealth, 

 men of means, have gratified their tastes, and paid their 

 money freely to possess animals well bred in regard to color, 

 shape, expression, &c., be it cow, sheep, hen, or pigeon. Just 

 as ladies who have means, who have plenty of money, will 

 gratify their tastes for articles of dress, just because those 

 articles are rare and expensive. Practically these finely-bred 

 fowls and camel's-hair shawls are worth no more than the 

 more common articles. A finely-bred bird, with certain 

 marks, if it lay no more eggs, or make no more meat, than 

 a healthy dunghill fowl, will sell for a much larger price to 

 persons who have means to gratify their tastes. 



Your acting chairman once indulged, to a limited extent, in 

 the breeding of pure-blood fowls ; and when he came to pay, 

 as on one occasion, five or six dollars per dozen for eggs from 

 a certain breed of fowls for hatching, his better-half made 

 free to express her utter astonishment, that men with or- 

 dinary brains, men who seemed to have at least common 

 sense about other matters, could be induced to pay fifty cents 

 apiece for hen's eggs, no larger, no better, as she could see, 

 than eggs that could be bought for from one to two cents 

 apiece. It seemed the most insane, the most foolish, mono- 

 mania, as it were, that ever came over human beings. We 

 answered that it did not seem much more foolish to pay three 

 dollars for six hen's eggs than for a lady to pay five thousand 

 dollars for a camel's-hair shawl, or twenty-five hundred dol- 

 lars for a little diamond ring just because it had a peculiar 

 glisten, or ten dollars a yard for point-lace, while the ring and 

 the lace were of no practical use, and a shawl that cost ten 

 or fifteen dollars would make the lady literally as com- 

 fortable as the one costing five thousand dollars. But the 

 woman had money, and she gratified her taste by purchasing 

 the shawl at five thousand dollars. There was not less 

 money in the world, it simply changed hands ; and parties 

 who needed the money more, perhaps, had become possessed 



