years' effort to force silk-culture and tlie introduction of 

 the mulberry ; — a story of failure in a vigorous attempt to 

 introduce " live fences," as the records then called hedges, 

 — of lirst turning attention, from 1835 to 1840, to horse- 

 ploughing, to nurseries, to kitchen-gardening, to the dyna- 

 mometer : — a story, finally, of great account naturally made 

 of di-ainage, but of quite as much attention paid (and this 

 I cannot understand) in essays and bounties and commit- 

 tees and gratuities, to the subject of irrigation, as to drain- 

 age. To a layman (and you see before you a very lame 

 'uii), it would seem that irrigation was a problem foreign 

 to the agriculture of Essex count3^ But it has not been so 

 treated. And I am driven for an explanation to the peril- 

 ous conjecture that, as this watering problem can by no 

 possibility have had to do, in an}^ way, with the milk sup- 

 ply, it must have borne some hidden relation to the trouble- 

 some cider problem, for very great attention was paid, in 

 early years, to cider, — cider bounties, cider gratuities, cider 

 committees, cider essays, — until, in 1834, a vote was passed 

 condemning the barrel of cider which should take the first 

 premium each year, for immediate consumption at the an- 

 nual dinner, and this siderial frenzy finally giving way be- 

 fore a growing adverse sentiment, and a premium offered 

 at last for the best essay on feeding cider-apples to swine 

 and fiit cattle, in the ver}" year of all others of this cen- 

 tury, the year of the hard-cider campaign of 1840. 



These brilliant annual gatherings culminated in the 

 splendid fair at Lynn in 1848 — the society then a genera- 

 tion old — the finest show thus far — where there were seen 

 twenty- nine ploughs, and an unrivaled field of stock, and 

 Daniel Webster — show enough in himself — amongst the 

 speakers at the dinner : — the society later extending its 

 fairs to cover two days each, and holding them at the "same 

 spot for two or three consecutive years : — then debating 

 long and well the problem of a permanent location : — first 



