112 BOARD OF AGEICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



from the potatoes that had been cut year after year and 

 those that were whole at the beginning and carried along. 

 They had given up that vigorous life. They had weakened 

 year after year, until the difference in the product was very 

 marked. 



I presume in that climate it was much better to have this 

 second crop of unripe potatoes. They were probably small 

 and uncut. If so, they would get better potatoes than from 

 those that were cut and kept longer. The longer you keep 

 a potato, the weaker it becomes. It loses its power to start 

 new growth. 



Mr. Kinney. Mr. Hersey and I exactly agree that the 

 potato is a tuber and not a seed. But I claim if I grow the 

 potato, dig it and sort it, I can get a more perfect tuber and 

 a more perfect plant than I can by buying out of a car 

 shipped here from Maine or elsewhere. I do not mean that 

 a farmer should put his potatoes in a cellar and let them 

 sprout all they want to. We have potatoes in as good shape 

 as the men who buy from the car. My own experience is, 

 if we take a perfect potato, grown from a perfect plant, and 

 put it in the cellar and keep it in perfect shape, we think it 

 will yield better than the potato we can buy. We have it 

 more under our control. 



Adjourned at 12.35. 



Afternoon Session. 



Chairman Wood called the meeting to order, in the Meth- 

 odist Church, at 2.10 p.m., and said: I will introduce Mr. 

 C. K. Brewster, the delegate from the Highland Agricultural 

 Society, who will preside this afternoon. 



Mr. Brewster. Ladies and gentlemen : A great deal 

 has been said and written in the past few years in regard to 

 the conditions of country life and the decadence of the hill 

 towns of Massachusetts and of New England. At the meet- 

 ing at Amherst, a year ago, a professor said it was one 

 object of the agricultural college to infuse new blood into 

 these hill towns. A magazine writer in the "Atlantic 

 Monthly " of last April said that the hill towns were evolving 

 a race of "poor whites." You have listened this week to 



