who addresses this body might well invite you to a review, 

 — hurried and inadequate though it could not fail to be, 

 — of the record of your own career. Should he rehearse 

 this, lie would point for inspii-ation to such names as Story 

 and White and Saltonstall and Cummins and Cleaveland 

 and Nichols and Merrill and all that splendid group of 

 worthies, who took early part with Pickering in assuring 

 your success. 



It would be a story of intelligent and public-spirited at- 

 tempts to make of a not too generous soil, described in the 

 first of the series of practical annual addresses from Col. 

 Pickering, in 1820, as "already exhausted and needing 

 manures " — to make of the old historic farms of Essex 

 county, standing — scores of them — in the names of the 

 original settlers — so many of them that your prize lists 

 read today like the records of baptisms and burials in the 

 early churches, — to make of such a patrimony a fit abiding 

 place for themselves and those who should come after them. 

 It would be a story of experiments costly of time and 

 means, — too often ending in defeat, — in many of the vital 

 problems of the present hour: — In the promotion and en- 

 couragement of tree-culture, for example, — premiums of- 

 fered, year after year, for seedling forest trees, in half-acre 

 and acre lots, raised mainly for the shipyards, but also for 

 fuel and for bark, — bounties on sumach, in the interests of 

 the tanneries, — bounties on larch, a new thing, then, in 

 ship-building, — on hackmetac, on white ash, on the oaks, 

 for the use of shipwrights, — bounties on hickory for the 

 coopers, — not neglecting bounties on the locust and white 

 mulberry and sugar-maple ; — it would be a stoiy of large 

 funds, raised l)y private gift, in order that the state bounty, 

 just offered in a conditional act of 181i», might be secured 

 to brave old Essex ; — the story of a trial of Alderney 

 stock, as early as 1826 ; — a stoiy of scant attention i)aid to 

 horses and to sheep, whilst boldly launching out in a fifteen 



