46 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



The peculiar characteristic pertaining to the farmer's conser- 

 vative habit is that it occasionally suffers unfortunate and costly 

 lapses. The owner of generous acres will often resist the teach- 

 ings of science and experience, and will sneer at the advice of the 

 ablest men in his own calling, only to grasp at the glib promises 

 of the man he never before saw and of whose trustworthiness he 

 knows absolutely nothing. 



We find in farm homes, as we find everywhere, a strange expect- 

 ancy concerning things new and untried. Humanity has always 

 been hoping that out of the land of magic would come the relief 

 from the burdens of life, or the promise and fulfillment of great 

 rewards from little effort. The fraudulent food and fertilizer, 

 the patent medicine, and the wonderful business opportunity 

 which offers a chance to get something out of nothing, all exist 

 because of this unconfessed faith in the extraordinary value of 

 the unknown. It is this credulity concerning things outside the 

 farmer's ordinary experience that renders it so difficult to defeat 

 the schemes which only defraud. 



It Avas not long ago that the farmers of Xew England paid 

 forty dollars per ton for diatomaceous earth with which to 

 strengthen the stalks of wheat. Even within a year some of our 

 Maine farmers were almost convinced that a certain business 

 concern had so interpreted Nature's methods that it had com- 

 pounded a fertilizer of whose concentration of power the ordi- 

 nary manufacturer of fertilizers never dreamed, and it was not 

 easy to dislodge this half-formed confidence in a mixture possess- 

 ing such unusual properties. Very recently, it was my own 

 duty to warn the stockmen of my State not to put their trust in 

 a certain class of foods, containing constituents of such pre- 

 tended efficiency that their use would solve the difficulties of 

 profitable stock feeding, by insuring the animals against disease 

 and by stimulating growth and milk prodiiction to an unusual 

 degree, and I have not found it easy to convince the public that 

 the knowledge never possessed by the ablest veterinarians and 

 that the food properties never discovered by science, nor revealed 

 to previous human experience, are to be distrusted. Within the 

 present year the efficient and courageous secretary of the Maine 

 Board of Agriculture has had a sharp and prolonged contest 

 with certain Western promoters, Avho for selfish reasons have 

 been trying, with some degree of success, to convince the dairy- 



