220 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
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their successful growth should be dependent upon one another. 
He is a daring man, and will ultimately be an unsuccessful farmer, 
who runs counter to this plain dictate of Providence. 
Hessian fly, midge, army worm, and diverse and nameless in¬ 
sects depredate upon the wheat crop, and in the eastern states, 
smut and mildew prevail to a great extent, and we are prone to 
attribute these to any cause which will relieve ourselves from the 
imputation of bad farming. Our daily observation is that vermin 
always attack a poor and diseased animal, and the analogy is 
perfect with regard to the depredations upon the poor and worn 
out earth. Exhaustion is productive of vermin, vermin of dis¬ 
ease, disease of death. Again, we are too much in the habit of 
treating the occupation of the farmer as a die cast upon the board 
of chance, to be consigned to the exigencies of time and season, 
when, on the contrary, all our work should be so performed as to 
anticipate time and season, and provide for their contingencies. 
There is one other subject to which I desire to direct your 
special attention ; the selection of seed. There is no more com¬ 
mon idea than that the seed degenerates from long use. No idea 
is more erroneous. If the general principle were true that vege¬ 
tation degenerates by cultivation, the world would have long since 
come to an end. The opposite conclusion is true, that cultivation 
is the improvement and life of vegetation, and that, by a selection 
of the best seed, the best roots and best animals, improvement is 
always the result. If a farmer, wanting fifty bushels of seed wheat, 
will run a hundred bushels through a winnowing mill until he re¬ 
duces them to the quantity required, he will improve his crop 
from five to twenty per cent. This is not a new idea; it has the 
authority of ages, for Virgil, in his JEneid, and in his own peculiar 
language, much more emphatically and beautifully expresses it i 
I have seen the largest seeds, tho’ viewed with care, 
Degenerate, unless th’ industrious hand 
Did yearly cull the largest. 
I have neither time nor opportunity now to discuss the subjects 
of stock raising, wool growing, or cheese and butter making, for 
allof which your natural facilities are such as are seldom bestowed 
upon any people, and I am pleased to know that they have al- 
