Winter Meeting. 243 



5. If this combined collection was awarded enough points by the 

 judge, it might receive the grand prize or the gold medal or the silver 

 medal as the case might be. 



6. All the awards are made on a scale of points, embracing: Size, 

 color, condition, quality, extent of exhibit. Every day as the fruits were 

 put on the tables the judges passed on them and made a score. At the 

 close, these scores were added up and the awards made on the result 

 of the scores thus recorded. 



7. Every state, every county, every person therefore, gets an award 

 upon the merits of the exhibit, and not in competition with any other 

 person or county or state, but on its merits — just the plan, by the way, 

 that our State Society has proposed and followed so satisfactorily for 

 the past ten years, and in our opinion the only correct plan. 



8. If an exhibit secured enough points to entitle it to grand prize 

 or gold medal or silver medal and then continues to make entries, the 

 last entries may be entirely lost, so far as awards are concerned. For 

 example, the State of Missouri made enough entries to entitle her to 

 three grand prizes for extent and size of exhibits, but, according to their 

 ruling, only one award could be made to the State on her exhibit. 



For example : We had enough apples alone, enough grapes alone, 

 enough other fruits alone to secure a grand prize, but entering them 

 all in the name of the State secured to us only one prize on extent of 

 exhibit. The same is true of county and personal exhibits, they might 

 have enough grapes, or strawberries or peaches or apples to entitle them 

 to a gold medal, but they would, in this case, get only one under this 

 ruling. This has cut us out of many an award, for we had on the tables 

 more than three times the quantity of fruit necessary to secure points 

 enough which would entitle us to the prizes awarded. 



I tell you this in explanation of the awards which many cannot under- 

 stand. But as an actual fact, the truest award given us was the uni- 

 versal verdict of the visiting people that Missouri had the most ex- 

 tensive and most complete exhibit in the building, and this exhibit was 

 not for day, but for all days, every day, special days, all the time, from 

 the beginning to the end. The extent of our exhibit can be understood 

 by the following record of kind and variety and number of plates which 

 have been on exhibition during the whole of the seven months of the 

 Fair : ■. 



