880 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



The annual returns or Transaetions of the various agricultu- 

 ral societies for the past year are more complete, full and valu- 

 able than they have usually been, though still, as a general rule, 

 far below tlie standard which societies enjoying the bounty of 

 the Commonwealth ouglit to maintain. Practical statements in 

 regard to the cultivation of crops, especially results of experi- 

 ments carefully tried and accurately reported, have a peculiar 

 value to every farmer who is proposing to cultivate and raise 

 similar crops, lint the difficulty with many of the statements 

 which appear in the Transactions of the societies, is that they 

 are not suificiently definite. I have so often called attention to 

 this defect, that it is a matter of regret to be compelled to al- 

 lude to it again, and to urge it upon the notice of the secreta- 

 ries of the societies, who have it in their power, in many cases 

 at least, to remedy it. 



Many of the Statements are necessarily omitted from the Ab- 

 stract, or second part of this Report, simply because they fail 

 in this most essential point, that of defmiteness, which makes 

 them utterly worthless as a guide to any farmer who should 

 propose to himself to repeat the experiment. To speak of ap- 

 plying so many " loads " of manure to an acre of corn, without 

 specifying what is meant by a load, conveys no clear idea of the 

 amount to a farmer in a distant section of the State, and the 

 publication of such a statement is of no use by way of instruc- 

 tion. 1 trust a mere allusion to this point will be sufficient to 

 lead to improvement in this respect. 



At the time of the preparation and presentation of the Re- 

 port of the Cattle Commissioners, which appears in the early 

 part of this volume, the disease known as the Epizootic aphtha, 

 or the " Foot and Mouth Disease," had but recently appeared 

 in our midst, and little time had been devoted to the investiga- 

 tion of its character and symptoms. It was not publicly known 

 to be the disease so very prevalent and so disastrous in Europe, 

 till the meeting of tlie State Board of Agriculture at Framing- 

 ham, about the middle of December, and then it was found to 

 have come through Albany and Brighton market, and to have 

 reached several large herds, and to be spreading like wildfire 

 in various directions from Brighton as the great centre and 

 focus. When it became known that we had a highly contagious 



