15 



produce a result sufficiently correct for all practical purposes. 

 But ill a State where tlie facilities for travel, except on general 

 routes to a few im])ortant localities, are so limited and expensive 

 as in ours, and where so few of our farmers have become so per- 

 manently fixed and devoted to their occupation as to inspire 

 that interest in the cause necessary for such an undertaking, and 

 80 few are able to afford the time and means for its faithful exe- 

 cution, such a system will be found, as it has already been found 

 by the last two years' efforts of this Board, almost totally inop- 

 erative. The present sj^stem of reports by the County and Dis- 

 trict Assessors to the Surveyor Greneral has proved to be equal- 

 ly unreliable and uncertain. Only from one-half to two-thirds 

 of the counties in the State being rei)Orted at all, and these re- 

 ports in many instances beinj^ mere rouiijh estimates instead of 

 actual and careful counts. Statistics thus partial and unrelia- 

 ble, in the opinion of the Board, tend rather to depreciate the 

 value and magnitude of our industrial resources, and to injure 

 and prejudice the importance and standing of our State, both 

 among our own people and abroad, than otherwise. 



Witliout narrating the history of the efforts of this Board, 

 during the session of the last Legislature, advised as they were 

 by our immediate ])redecessors, and seconded by every District 

 and County Agricultural Society in the State, to rectify these 

 evils, and to obtain the passage of a law w^iich would in our 

 opinion have provided an efficient and effective system by which 

 reliable statistics relating to all our industries and productions 

 would have been obtained, we will venture to expi'css the hope 

 that our next Legislature will take a more practical and com- 

 prehensive view of the material wants of the State, and will 

 comprehend and supply the necessity of a system by which 

 through the proper channels, we may possess. ourselves of a full 

 sheet exhibiting all our productions and our pi-esent and future 

 capacities. One short Statute that would effectually accomplish 

 this object, would be of a more real and lasting benefit to our 

 State than a whole volume of such laws as usually emanate from 

 each session of our Legislatui-e. Upon this subject and the ne- 

 cessity of State aid to Agricultural Societies, Dr. E. S. llolden, 

 President of the San Joaquin District Agricultural Society, than 

 •whom no man in the State understands the State's necessities 

 better, holds the following languaire in his last annual address 

 before that Society : 



"Last year this Society, together with several other similar 

 associations, petitioned our Legislature to apjiropriate a few 

 thousantl dollars for premium money, but our Solons failed to 

 see the benefit of such appropriations; they failed to see that 

 three-fourths of their constituents were ])roducing by the sweat 

 of their brows their vexy existence, their biead and butter. 

 But there was one thing they could easily comprehend, and that 



