X ADVEKTISEMENT. 



Sect. 3. Any agricultural society which shall neglect, in any year, to com- 

 ply with the foregoing provisions, shall forfeit its claim to the bounty of the 

 Commonwealth the year next succeeding. 



Sect. 4. The Secretary of the Commonwealth is hereby directed to cause 

 to be made and published, in each year, for distribution, as full an abstract as, 

 in his judgment, will be useful, from the returns aforesaid of the agricultural 

 societies. 



Sect, 5. Any person who shall incur the forfeiture mentioned in the ninth 

 section of the forty-second chapter of the Revised Statutes, may be prosecuted, 

 by complaint before any justice of the peace who shall have jurisdiction there- 

 of; and all forfeitures so recovered shall be, by said justice of the peace, paid 

 over to the county treasurer for the use of the county. 



Sect. 6. The Secretary of the Commonwealth is hereby directed to trans- 

 mit a copy of this act to the secretary of every incorporated agricultural so- 

 ciety in the Commonwealth, on or before the first day of September next. 



Sect. 7. The thirty-first chapter of the acts of the year eighteen hundred 

 and forty-two ; also, the one hundred and eleventh chapter of the acts of the 

 year one thousand eight hundred and forty-five, and all parts of acts hereto- 

 fore passed, inconsistent with the provisions of this act, are hereby repealed. 



Accordingly, the only papers henceforward to be transmitted by 

 Agricultural Societies to the Secretary's office are the certificate and 

 return required in the first section ; and both are to be filed annually, 

 on or before the tenth day of January. But the certificate, to deter- 

 mine the amount of the Commonwealth's bounty for the present year, 

 is to be filed some time in the month of October. 



Some suggestions concerning the character of the returns hitherto 

 made, and the improvements of which they are susceptible, are con- 

 tained in the following letter from the Hon. Allen W. Dodge, of Ham- 

 ilton, who has again afforded me his valuable aid m the preparation of 

 the Abstract. 



" In obedience to your request, 1 proceed to give you such views as have sug- 

 gested themselves to me, relative to the agricultural returns, and the improve- 

 ments which may be made in them. The experiment of compiling, in a single 

 volume, the transactions of the several Agricultural Societies in the Common- 

 wealth receiving its bounty, has been made in conformity with the act of 

 March 7, 1845, and has met with the general favor of those interested in the 

 pursuit and the advancement of husbandry among us. In the new volume 

 now issued, exhibiting a summary of the returns of 1846, will be found a rec- 

 ord of the material facts marking the history^ for that year, of the several so- 

 cieties, and pointing ihe way to future progress. It was not, perhaps, to be 

 expected that any great improvement would be exhibited in the returns con- 



