vi APPENDIX. 



I trust the time is not far distant when our agricultural societies will 

 cease to offer premiums for animals that can give no promise of 

 improvement to their progeny. 



The show of poultry was not large, but very good. Swine were rep- 

 resented by a few specimens. Sheep, I am sorry to say, there Avere 

 none to speak of. 



The dinner, which is a very pleasant feature of the exhibitions of this 

 society, was nearly over when I reached the hall, and I found a gentle- 

 man, — one of the representatives of the people of Massachusetts in the 

 Congress of the United States, — entertaining the company with a speech 

 in which he took occasion to say that he had always opposed the estab- 

 lishment of an agricultural college, and gave it as his opinion that it 

 would surely fail. That it could succeed he pronounced inconsistent 

 with the nature of things. Just what things, the gentleman did not tell 

 us ; but suppose it must have been the ungenerous things he had said 

 against it. He thought it useless, also, to teach anything of agriculture 

 in our common schools. The farmer must get his special education on 

 the land only. He represented the occupation of the farmer as hard, 

 coarse and repulsive, and thought as soon as our young men were edu- 

 cated enough to fit them for any other business, they would leave it on 

 the first opportunity. Hence the inference was, to keep men on the 

 farms they must be kept in ignorance. Therefore, he would have no 

 colleges for farmers. He would organize a corps of learned professors, 

 who should perambulate .the State during the summer season, and 

 observe the efforts of the untaught farmers to dig their education from 

 the ground, and in the winter give lectures on the soil and its wants, 

 and, like Dr. Hornbook, "just its disease and what would mend it, at 

 once they'd tell." But just how and where he expected to find and 

 educate those wonderful professors the gentleman did not inform us. In 

 the days when prophets were held in higher esteem than now, there 

 were false prophets, — prophets of Baal, — whose predictions came to 

 naught. Such, I trust, will be the fate of the doleful foreboding of the 

 gentleman alluded to. 



I did not remain to witness the exhibition of horses which took place 

 the following day, but am informed that there were many fine animals 

 on the ground. 



William Birnie. 



