60 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



the European standard, because of our exposure to colder 

 temperature. But when these several standards of nutrition 

 are- reduced to calories or mechanical equivalents of heat, 

 they come very closely together, — in fact, they are substan- 

 tially alike. 



In this we find an analogy to the development of organic 

 life upon the earth. At the tropics, where heat is greatest, 

 we find the most abundant and luxuriant vegetation, the 

 greatest activity in the production of animal life, but also 

 the most rapid decay and the least duration of vegetable 

 forms. As we pass northward into the temperate zone, we 

 find production requiring the application of energy somewhat 

 in inverse proportion to the heat of the sun ; we find that the 

 crops of almost every kind can be kept longer without decay 

 the farther north we get in the temperate zone ; we observe 

 that the fruits possess more flavor and will also keep longer, 

 and that what we lack in heat we make up in conservation. 

 As we go to the far north, we find the lack of heat made up 

 by the conversion of more fat into human vigor in the 

 nutrition of man. 



In dealing with this subject I have been sometimes inclined 

 to take a paradoxical position . I once addressed the Asso- 

 ciated Boards of Trade of New Hampshire on the elements 

 of material progress or wealth. I told them that historically 

 the progress of any given body of people had apparently 

 been in inverse proportion to their possession of natural 

 resources. The wealth of Holland had become the greatest 

 of any nation until the oppression of armies and of Napoleon 

 built up a debt which has not yet been surmounted ; yet the 

 people of Holland not only make crops, but make the land 

 itself on which the crops are grown. 



The inhabitants of Massachusetts are probably the richest 

 people as a body in the world ; yet Massachusetts could not 

 bread herself, as our Southern friends put it, for a week. 

 In contrast, as I told my friends in New Hampshire, that 

 State had the disadvantage of possessing some attractive 

 natural scenery and could therefore live to some extent on 

 fish and strangers, as they do in Florida, without as much 

 exertion on their own part as we were called upon to develop 

 in Massachusetts ; therefore our people were better off than 

 they were. 



