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GENESEE FARMER. 



Oct. 



The Great State Fair at Buffalo. 



A DESCRIPTION of ihis great Festival has 

 been so minutely, and yet graphically given to 

 the public by the Buffalo press, that I shall now 

 only note some of my impressions. In laking 

 a cursory view of the great spectacle — as I cast 

 my eyes upon the splendid equipages, surcharged 

 with the beauty and fashion of this great City of 

 the Lakes, wending their way to the Fair — I 

 could but think that Ike Marvel had spoken truly 

 when he said that the New York ladies at the 

 Springs, found themselves completely nonplussed 

 by those of Buffalo ; the Buffalonians repaying 

 the New Yorkers for their patronizing explana- 

 tion of the late New York fashions, by a like 

 compassionate detail of the fashions at Niagara. 



The first thing striking, on entering the en- 

 closure is the fine semi-military selection of the 

 fair ground, flanked as it is by a beautiful wood 

 of deciduous trees, and the cattle located there ; 

 this shows that the Buffalonians have an eye to 

 the utile as well as to the dulci. Here are more 

 specimens of mechanical ingenuity for the bene- 

 fit of the farmer alone, than perhaps was ever 

 seen before at a rural fair. Here the great am- 

 bulatory tent, of Free Soil notoriety, was turned 

 into the temple of Flora and Pomona, festooned 

 around its entire circle with a wreath composed 

 of the twigs of the White Cedar, {Thuja Occi- 

 dentaUs.) As an imperimn in imperio, there 

 stood up in the middle of this monster tent a 

 little temple, formed by a succession of tiny 

 graceful Gothic arches, trimmed with the same 

 everlasting arhor vitae ; the interior was en- 

 livened by a plaster model of Flora herself 

 Here were flowers of beauty rare; enormous 

 bouquets made up of ffowers of endless variety, 

 from the domesticated exotic, to the native wild 

 flower — from the gaudy, unfragrant Dahlia of 

 the garden, to the sweet and delicate Metella of 

 the secluded lake side glen. ^ 



Among the fruits and vegetables, 1 noticed 

 the large thin skinned melons of a more sunny 

 clime, perhaps from Ohio, or Indiana ; Egg 

 Plants as big as a medium sized pumpkin, the 

 largest I ever saw ; but farther than this, it was 

 the quantity and variety, rather than the size of 

 the vegetable specimens that elicited admiration. 



Animated nature was here represented, on a 

 more extensive scale perhaps than it was ever 

 before exhibited at a State Fair. It was pleas- 

 ant to see the genus homo, here in the character 

 of men from every state and kingdom. Here 

 was the respectable Canadian farmer, eulogizing 

 with foreign accent, the modern improvements 

 of brother Jonathan ; then you might see the 

 voluble Frenchman, and the quiet German, pipe 

 in mouth, commenting con amore in colloquial 

 Dutch, on the superior points of the Springport 

 Norman horse. Here were young, but coarse 

 German vraulein, looking at stoves and washing 



machines ; matronly Yankee women examining 

 churns, baby jumpers, &c., with aufait remarks 

 and a practical eye ; younger ones listening to the 

 fine variations of a male performer on the piano 

 forte — while still others stood looking with ad- 

 miring gaze at cages of Parrots and Canary 

 Birds, or the coarser coops which contained the 

 coarser specimens of the genus aves. As if to 

 give spice and variety to the living throng, and 

 to make out the panorama, here, too, were pairs 

 of young farmers, leading their fair inamoritas 

 by the hand, looking at each other as though they 

 themselves were the best and happiest of the 

 show ; as though they had arrived at that point 

 in the drama of life, which Chas. Lamb has de- 

 scribed as "egotism for two." 



We now come to the Annual Address, deliv- 

 ered by the Hon. J. C. Spencer. It did me 

 good to see here before this improvised Rostrum, 

 men come to listen and to learn, whose physical 

 bearing proclaimed the respectability of the life 

 they had lived. Men who had grown up practical 

 students of the soil, and its products, in nature's 

 grand and healthful laboratory ; men who had, 

 to the full meridian of life, preserved themselves 

 intact, from all the low, factitious tricks of trade, 

 alike from the pretension of the professional 

 man, and from the selfish hypocrisy of the party 

 politician. You felt that these men had come 

 here from from no sinister motive of ambition 

 or selfishness, but from a sincere desire to see, 

 to learn and to reciprocate, knowledge for know- 

 ledge ; the result of one practical experiment 

 for that of another practical experiment — not to 

 learn the successful tricks by which man cir- 

 cumvents his fellow man in the great drama of 

 artificial life, but only to witness the progress 

 that man has made in farming as an art, and in 

 farming as a science. In other words to see 

 and to learn, how much the art of tillage can be 

 improved by man's industrial ingenuity, and how 

 much his ingenuity can be aided, his labors 

 rewarded and made easy, by a knowledge of 

 the few, very few simple elements, which nature 

 combines to produce organic life in her vegeta- 

 ble and animal kingdoms. The hypercritical 

 may sneer at the idea that a farmer or a farmer's 

 son could learn a lesson in the science of his 

 calling, amidst the burly burly of this great Fes- 

 tival. But here may he not at least, shake off a 

 part of his egotism, his obsolete prejudices — the 

 loss of which alone is indispensable to that healthy 

 state of mind which leads to study, reflection 

 and investigation. Stolid must be the ignorance 

 and insensibility of that mind which can coolly 

 survey the thousand improvements here, physi- 

 cal and intellectual, vegetable, animal and irti- 

 ficial, without a desire to know something of 

 the modus operandi that produced such results. 



May we not hope that when the farmer's son 

 returns from this great Festival, the M^ft^ws with- 

 in him, aroused by what he has heard — his cu- 



