86 BOARD OF AGRICULTUEE. 



cream from the milk, and to leave the milk. You know you 

 can raise good calves on skim-milk, with a little meal. I 

 see no reason why we cannot go back and raise them for our 

 own herds. As to fattening them, I see the difficulty sug- 

 gested by our friend over there. These hills have been 

 skimmed until there is nothing left on them ; but we have 

 got to get them back into fertility in some way. I do not 

 know but putting cattle on them would get them back. 

 But this is a great question, and some good thoughts have 

 been thrown out here, which I hope will bear fruit. 



SPECIALTIES IN FARMING. 



BY ATERY P. SLADE. 



All whose memory runs back twenty-five or thirty years 

 must have noticed the wonderful changes that have accom- 

 panied the progress of New England agriculture. It was 

 once thought that success in farming depended chiefly on 

 muscular activity, and that the cultivation of the brain or 

 the employment of brain-power had but little to do with the 

 cultivation of the soil ; hence the prevailing custom in those 

 days of selecting the brightest boys in the family to adorn 

 professional life, and reserving the thick-headed dunce, who 

 was always at the foot of his class, for the drudgery of a 

 farmer's life. But since science has come to the aid of the 

 farmer, and lighted up the path of the husbandman, the old 

 custom has been completely reversed, and now doctors, 

 lawyers, and I may say clergymen, are made of the indifier- 

 ent material, while the lad having the most sense — and that 

 is made, in fact, of the finest clay — is the only one that can 

 reasonably hope to become a successful farmer. Everything 

 pertaining to the advancement of agriculture is being made 

 the subject of careful experiment and rigid scientific investi- 

 gation. The laws governing the vegetable kingdom, and 

 hitherto unknown, are being transcribed from tables of stone, 

 infinitely multiplied, and scattered on paper leaves broadcast 

 from the schools of science among the tillers of the soil. 



Farmers' clubs, which are scarcely outnumbered by the 

 .school-houses in the States, are discussing questions of policy 



