PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING. 351 



feeding yards, great herds of hogs following the cattle, and they are fat- 

 tened and gotten ready for market chiefly on the food they gather from 

 the excrement of these fattening cattle. I know perfectly well that there 

 are not a half-dozen people here but know" enough about sheep to know 

 that they would not succeed under that treatment, and yet that is the 

 best treatment with hogs; they can do better with it than any other. In 

 the same way, certain things that would be successful for sheep will not 

 do for hogs. For instance, sheep will do well without water, while your 

 hog would fail to fatten without water. They are different; one requires 

 one thing and the other requires the other. A good shepherd is rarely 

 a good swineherd, a good swineherd rarely a good shepherd. Each kind 

 of animal must be studied if a man would succeed in feeding it; that is a 

 principle well-known by any one who has ever attempted to feed those 

 animals. The same thing is true in your barn. Certain men will succeed 

 in taking care of your stock, and will get a good deal more milk from 

 your cows, and keep j'our horses in better condition than certain other 

 men. Sometimes one man will succeed with a horse and fail with the 

 cows, and sometimes one man will fail with the horse and succeed with 

 the cows. It is a matter of study and understanding of that particular 

 thing. 



Now, it has not been thought so, but it is just as true of plants. No man 

 can succeed with even our garden plants unless he can put his brains into 

 the work, brains which will be forced by love to study the plants and 

 knov, their characteristics until he knows what they like and unlike. 

 Take our bean plant in comparison with cabbage, just as I have compared 

 sheep and hogs — I compare them the same way. First let us commence 

 at the root. What is the root habit of the bean plant? You will find, if 

 you plant a bean as I have, on sandy soil, that by the time the plant is 

 grown up and formed two leaves as big as that (indicating), even as small 

 as- that, not more than three inches across from the outside, by a careful 

 digging we can And that the roots of the bean plants have met in rows 

 which are twenty-eight inches apart; in other words, a bean plant with 

 leaves no bigger than my fingers has thrown roots over fourteen inches 

 long. The roots of the bean plant run out long, continually searching for 

 food. 



Now, take another point. Break off one of those roots. Does it heal 

 immediately and throw out some new branch roots? Not at all. Very 

 frequently, particularly along late in the season, after the plant has got 

 some development, a broken bean root does not branch; it stays right 

 where it is and does not throw out any new branches to take the place of 

 the one broken off, and it suffers more, perhaps, than any other plant that 

 I know of, from just simply the breaking of one of those long roots. 



Take another point. A bean root, when it comes to an obstruction, 

 which it can not penetrate, like a hard piece of soil or a stone, or which it 

 can not follow around easily in the soil, it just stops, discouraged, and 

 does not grow any more, and that is the end of that particular root, and 

 you can not coax it through. With some roots it is different. Put a rot- 

 ten board down in a piece of quick grass sod, and you will find the roots 

 will grow right through it. A bean root will do nothing of the kind. The 

 minute it finds the obstruction it stops right there, and that root does not 

 grow any further. The bean is able to collect and utilize very closely and 



