THIRTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL CONVENTION 91 



tion of 7,202.7 pounds of milk per year, an average of 377.24 

 pounds of butter fat. 



Now, the question is : Did it pay that man to know what he 

 was doing-? Has he been paid for the time which it took to do 

 the weighing of the milk, to test the milk and keep the records? 

 When we stop to realize the vast advance that Mr. Charles L. 

 Hill has made in the dairy business, which he attributes to hav- 

 ing made records of his work as he went along, we can have 

 some idea of the value of those records. 



It is well known what Mr. Gillett did with Colantha 4th's Jo- 

 hanna. We know something about the price he would want if 

 he would sell one of her calves. We know he went and bought 

 one of these calves back and sold it for something like $8,000, 

 and I don't suppose that calf had any more intrinsic value than 

 it had when it sold for $400 or $500. 



When I was in Colorado a man told me he had a Holstein 

 bull, and he said, "One clay I got a telegram from Mr. Gillett, who 

 offered me $500 and another one equally as good for that bull. 

 I wired back I wouldn't take it. Then he offered me $1,000 and 

 I wouldn't take it. Then I got a letter from him telling me to 

 keep that bull, and then he told me he was very closely related 

 to Colantha 4th's Johanna." 



Now the question is, was that bull any better than when he 

 first bought it? It was simply the fact that they had found out 

 the real value of the blood of Colantha 4th's Johanna that made 

 the calf valuable. 



I also have a letter from Mr. C. I. Hood, in which he says : 

 "No one can estimate in dollars and cents the value of authen- 

 ticated records and the register of merit. If you could examine 

 the strong, rugged, everyday producing cows in our herd, with 

 their unsurpassed constitutions and dairy characteristics, and then 

 could compare records which show that generation after genera- 

 tion the heifer has done better than her clam, you would begin to 

 appreciate, as we do, the value of those authenticated records. I 

 wonder if breeders of dairy cattle ever thought of what the tests 

 made in the register of merit are worth to the young men who 

 go out from the Agricultural College and work among the 



