BREEDING METHODS. 241 



regarded as warnings to others against writing 

 rather than as against bad farming. If they 

 warned against the latter and accentuated the 

 evil by advertising it, they should assuredly be 

 encouraged so far as possible to rush into print, 

 for no lesson needs to be more widely taught 

 and more thoroughly learned than that of the 

 evil of slovenly, wasteful farm management 



I am not going to try to inculcate, then, any 

 hot-house, indoor theories; any fancies thin 

 as air and tenuous as morning dreams; nor 

 shall I seek to point a way which shall be only 

 practicable to the few wealthy stock-breeders 

 who can afford to use every appliance, however 

 costly or difficult to obtain. Where the cir- 

 cumstances will admit of it we should seek to 

 apply the strict economical law, that in order 

 to rightly conduct any business we must have 

 the most suitable material and the most per- 

 fectly adapted labor; that we must have the 

 labor so utilized as to waste as little as possible 

 of time and energy, and the materials so used 

 as to get the utmost return in initial consump- 

 tion, and also make use of the waste in some 

 way to prevent its loss. But in many cases in 

 Western farming we only roughly approximate 

 this law, and I am too little of a theorist and 

 too much of a practical farmer to think that 

 the world is coming to an end in consequence. 

 We must indeed work toward it. If we do not 



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