WORKING OXEN. 349 



working oxen ; for it is manifest that most of our farmers do 

 not feci any inducement to compete with a few towns, who can 

 cheaply send their fat cattle, and make, in the words of the so- 

 ciety, " the best string of twenty yoke." 



All that can be done should be, to induce our farmers to 

 appreciate duly the great importance of exhibiting annually 

 from every town in the county a sample of their best oxen 

 before their natural forms are concealed by fat, when they 

 are, in farmers' phrase, " in working order." 



Of so much importance have well-formed working and other 

 cattle been deemed by the French, that, at their first agricul- 

 tural exhibition in 1850, fat cattle were entirely excluded; and 

 the competition, so far as animals were concerned, was confined 

 to breeding stocks and male and female horned cattle. The 

 result is, the French shows from the first have been continu- 

 ally progressive. This success a recent English agricultural 

 writer attributes to the fact that the French have wisely 

 avoided the English error of bestowing too great a share of 

 attention to over-fed stock— an error which the writer says 

 brought much well-founded censure and ridicule upon the Roy- 

 al Agricultural Show in England respecting the neat cattle 

 there exhibited. 



Our National Society, at its exhibition of cattle this month in 

 Springfield, Ohio, in its instructions to judges, says, "We have 

 the greatest regard to the symmetry, early maturity and size, and 

 the judges are expressly required not to give encouragement 

 to over-fed animals." 



Your committee hope that every town in the county will, in 

 future, be represented by at least twenty oxen in working con- 

 dition. Surely the farmer raises no animal in favor of which 

 so much can be said, nearly all of whose parts, with scarcely a 

 particle of loss, can be applied to some useful purpose. In no 

 way so cheaply and so conveniently as by such a representa- 

 tion from every town in the county can our farmers and cattle 

 dealers judge which town in Franklin has oxen the best for 

 work, the best in form and color, the best profitably to make 

 ''the most blood for chemical uses, the most hair for the use 

 of the mason, the most fat for tallow, hide for leather, horn 



