51 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



keeping, what is worth practising, what ought to be thrown 

 into the waste baslcet, just as our stations take samples of 

 fertilizers that are sent to them, and tell what they think 

 about them, it seems to me tliey would be doing a great deal 

 of good in the right direction. As an illustration, we all 

 know the big stories that we have read every few weeks 

 about the yield of butter from milch cows. My belief is, that 

 in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, if not more, where 

 these stories have been written and afterwards circulated 

 through the country, they have been honest in the first in- 

 stance. The man tests his cow for twenty-four hours (per- 

 haps some of them are satisfied with that), or for a week, 

 under the most favorable conditions, and publishes the* re- 

 sult, and it goes all over the country that such a person has 

 a very remarkable cow. He is honest in his story; lie gives 

 certain facts ; but he does not answer the multitude of ques- 

 tions that ought to be fired at him right away. These stories, 

 as I say, go into the press, and to a certain extent they are 

 accepted as the standards of what a milch cow ought to do. 

 Now, a friend of mine, who had been in previous years mainly 

 a horse man, some two or three years ago became interested 

 in a herd of dairy cows, and I remember his stating to me 

 at that time, as his firm belief, that there were not as many 

 cows in the United States that made fourteen pounds of but- 

 ter in seven days as there were horses that had trotted in 

 2: 22 or something of that sort. That was his opinion. At 

 any rate, he brought down the number of fourteen-pound cows 

 to some half dozen in the country. A declaration of that 

 sort, published in a prominent journal, naturally brought out 

 a great many statements, and a vast number of statements 

 have been made since of animals that have done as much 

 work as that in the way of butter making, or more. 



Now, the question comes at once, what was the value of 

 those different statements. This gentleman, being a man of 

 considerable leisure, and feeling a good deal of interest in the 

 matter, has gone to the trouble of following up these various 

 statements that he has picked up in the newspapers, and 

 through his correspondence, and propounded a long list of 

 questions to every man who had put such facts on record 



