270 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



breathed his inspiration and fed his soul from nature's store- 

 house, so that out of his noble heart and great intellect came 

 gems of thought, clear and chaste and beautiful, that will go 

 down the ages like diamonds upon the bosom of literature. 

 Who that loves the music of poetry, or the song of a crystal 

 spirit, or the touch of a master hand, does not feel the richer 

 for the life of William Cullen Bryant? Here, too, in the 

 same neighborhood was born and reared that astute lawyer 

 and statesman, Henry L. Dawes, who for eighteen years 

 represented his district in the National House of Representa- 

 tives, and for eighteen years Massachusetts in the Senate of 

 the United States. 



The little town of Middletield, with its 386 inhabitants, 

 has given many able men to the world, of whom I might 

 mention Dr. Judson Smith, secretary of the Board of Foreign 

 Missions, whose recent travels in China will do much to open 

 her gateways to the light of the western continent. This 

 little town has to-day a professor and two members in the 

 Massachusetts Agricultural College. 



Worthington has furnished two mayors for the city of New 

 York, in the persons of Gideon Lee and Dr. Aaron Clark ; 

 a chief justice for the State of Kansas, in the person of 

 Samuel A. Kingman ; and Prof. Harmon Niles, the noted 

 naturalist of Cambridge ; and Russell H. Con well, the 

 famous preacher and lecturer of Philadelphia, whose an- 

 nual income represents more dollars than the combined worth 

 of all their fathers' estates. 



These small contiguous farming towns to which I have 

 referred had a population in 1895 of 3,247 inhabitants; and, 

 while I would not make invidious comparisons, I would like to 

 have any one cite a contiguous territory in any city of like 

 population that ever produced such a galaxy of great men. 



All these I have mentioned were sons of farmers of small 

 means, — men who struggled among the middle classes in 

 their rural country homes ; out of the loins of tillers of New 

 England soil ; out from the way-back hill tops, where the 

 air is not infested with noxious vapors, and the water is as 

 clear as a September sky, these strong men have come. 



The men who have moved the world in thoughtful aspira- 

 tion in the nineteenth century have sprung largely from 



