No. 4.] BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 393 



at the slightest expense either of money or time, and by a 

 simple process that any farmer can use. This is one line of 

 aid to the farmer that the Dairy Bureau will demonstrate 

 during the present year, and this instruction and demonstra- 

 tion will be of incalculable benefit to the dairy interests of 

 Massachusetts. This is aside from my subject, perhaps, but 

 its importance justifies its introduction. 



The history of this Board is full of instruction to the 

 farmer in this important dairy department, and its results 

 are plainly seen : till to-day it is the exception when you 

 find in our herds or on our hill-sides the old general- 

 purpose cow or no-purpose cow, with the greatest capacity 

 for food and the least for milk, cared for and retained 

 because, forsooth, she has a good carcass for beef when 

 killed. Here kindness is its own reward, and unkindness 

 preying on her nervous organization is its own punishment. 

 To-day the cow is a petted animal, must I say because 

 gentleness has a money value? No, I will not, for I do not 

 believe this to be the chief reason. Kindness has been from 

 the first a fundamental teaching in this Board. 



And with the sheep, the importation, the encouragement, 

 the improvement in breeds, management and profit, are 

 largely due to this Board, and a prominent part of its work, 

 with excellent results ; and if after all much of our labor has 

 " gone to the dogs," it is not the fault of the Board. 



And last the swine. How different the breeds, the 

 treatment and the resultant profit. The great coarse hog, 

 burrowing in filth for one and a half or two years, eating 

 himself up once or twice over, is past, and we have in his 

 place the clean, small-boned, fine-fleshed pig, hastened to 

 market at just the point of greatest profit. In all these 

 changes the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture has been a 

 pioneer worker, a potent factor ; and its country meetings, 

 its institutes, its lectures, its reports, have carried the leaven 

 of its teaching to every farmer's fireside in the State, and 

 who can compute its influence? 



Now turn your eye to the vegetable, the grain, the fruit 

 and the flower ; and first in every department, creating, 

 enlarging and transforming, is this same old Board, — creat- 

 ing new and greatly better varieties, enlarging by scientific 



