164 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Our severe cold, which penetrates to our very firesides, lias 

 compelled us, from the beginning, to house those animals in the 

 Aviuter, while they, doubtless, suffer much in other countries 

 where the winters are sufficiently mild to allow them to be 

 exposed unsheltered without absolute cruelty, and yet not mild 

 enough to enable them to bear such exposure comfortably. 

 Tlic practice, so general in England, for instance, of permitting 

 cattle to remain out during the whole of the year, is justly 

 censured by that eminent agriculturist, our late countryman. 

 Dr. Colman, as a most slovenly and unthrifty one. In our dry 

 summers too, our sheep and neat cattle seem in a great degree 

 exempt from many diseases which prevail in England, and are 

 ascribed principally to the damp weather. We accordingly 

 find that a race of cattle has grown up among us which, though 

 a very moderate degree of attention has been paid to them on 

 the whole, is highly distinguished by its valuable qualities in 

 every essential particular; and although the importation of 

 valuable foreign animals should by no means be discouraged, it 

 is far from certain that the best mode of improving our domes- 

 tic cattle is not by careful selections from our own stock. Our 

 New England climate, like every other climate on the globe, 

 often calls forth complaint and criticism from those who live 

 under it ; but when we give it due credit for the great variety 

 and importance of the vegetable productions, whether grain or 

 fruit, which can be raised in the greater portion of the States 

 of New England, and for its proverbial healthiness, as respects 

 our farming stock, to say nothing of its far more important 

 effects in invigorating our farming population, we shall proba- 

 bly allow that it abundantly compensates us, even in an agricul- 

 tural point of view, for its violent changes, nipping winters and 

 parching droughts. 



