NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART XI 525 
ing spectacles ever staged at such an exhibition was the dairymaid's drill, 
performed by ten young women from the Iowa Agricultural College at 
Ames, while the dairy cattle were on parade. Each of the animals wore a 
Swiss cow bell, and the tintinnabulation suggested vividly winding home- 
ward o'er the lea of dairy herds galore. This dairymaid's drill was given 
by a college class in calisthenics, ten young women gowned all in white, 
five of them carrying beribboned milking stools and the other five berib- 
boned milkpails, and the graceful evolutions of the drill, performed with 
spirit and precision to the music of the band and the tinkling of the cow 
bells, formed a feature of singular attractiveness and thoroughly conso- 
nant with the character of the occasion. This exercise was originally in- 
troduced as a May dance at Ames, and it was a happy thought which sug- 
gested its reproduction during the parade of the dairy cattle. 
This arena further afforded a striking linking of the past with the 
present, and an instructive illustration of the progress in transportation 
which has marked the past half century. The entrance of the Armour six- 
horse team of grays, sufficient in itself to enthrall the attention of assem- 
blies on both continents, received measurable emphasis by contrast with 
the "Gee, haw, whoa!" of the ox driver preceded the entrance of a genuine 
old "prairie schooner" drawn by a yoke of oxen. The wagon, loaned by 
the historical department at the state house, was somewhat of a wreck in, 
•its slatted body, but the gears were in fair order, and more than a hint of 
the manner in which the trail of civilization was blazed across the trackless 
prairies of the great American desert was afforded by this historic exhibit. 
The contrast in transportation, the old-time, patient slow-moving oxen in 
the yoke, and the prancing ponderous draft horses of the present era, clad 
in their beautiful and brilliant harness and housings, touched chords that 
vibrated more deeply than those to which mere amusement appeals. 
The rest of the program was taken chiefly from the circus, including 
trained elephants, donkeys, dogs and bulls, with the clown and acrobatic 
features so familiar through all these years of perennial circus perform- 
ances. It was not especially enlightening, but it appeared to be enter- 
taining to the assembled thousands, and rounded out with the froth of 
mere amusement a day and a night that had been crowded to the full with 
educational tendencies. 
When the 45 acres of agricultural implements are reached one's lungs 
inhale the real Iowa atmosphere, one's vision broadens to the wide sweep 
of its activities and possibilities. Here is a real index of the agricultural 
importance of the commonwealth. Four hundred exhibitors contributed to 
it, about 100 more than last year. Every conceivable variety of farm im- 
plement is in evidence, all of them suggesting strikingly the modern need 
of supplementing and economizing human labor by machinery. Motive 
power was present. The ponderous traction engines, propelled by steam 
and by gasoline, the stationary gas engine in its multiplicity of forms, 
edging now on to what may be described as the "vest pocket" size, and 
the farm auto all offered power, traction and transportion to the farmer. 
The gasoline engine was readily the dominant feature of the exhibit, and 
possibly the manure spreader was next numerously represented. Several 
sermons could be preached from these texts. 
