230 Wisconsin state agricultural society. 
the drainage of our large cities is sufficient, if it were to be util¬ 
ized, to renovate half the worn-out lands in the entire nation. 
In 1869, I availed myself of an apportunity to visit the far 
famed sewers of Paris, and found them as clean and pure as the 
rain water conductors upon our houses ; in fact, scarcely anything 
but the rain water was permitted to escape into the river Seine, 
which forms their avenue of escape ; whereas the Mississippi and 
its various tributaries receive each year, from the numerous cities 
on their banks, millions of dollars worth of the most valuable fer¬ 
tilizing agents, which are wastefully permitted to be lost in the 
salt sea by our careless and extravagant countrymen, although the 
need of these very fertilizers is becoming greater each year. It 
must indeed be self-evident that the various chemical elements 
withdrawn from the soil in the production of any particular crop 
should be forthwith returned to it again, in one or another form, 
in order to maintain our farming lands in their original fertility. 
The sun, the wind, the snow and the rain are not by themselves 
sufficient to renovate wornout land, as some of our farmers appear 
to believe. 
Much can be done toward replenishing the soil by diversifying 
the character of the crops; more, perhaps, by paying greater at¬ 
tention to the raising of stock; and in the splendid exhibition of 
fine animals we have witnessed here to-day, I hail the promise of 
a higher standing of farming excellence at no very great distance 
of time. 
The simple and yet all sufficient remedy for our previous mis¬ 
takes, and the true secret of success in the matter of properly re¬ 
plenishing the soil, consist in the consumption of the productions 
of that soil as nearly as possible upon the land where they are 
raised. The product may be consumed either by the brute crea¬ 
tion or by human beings. In the first case, every farmer must de¬ 
termine to unite the business of stock raising with the production 
of the food required to feed himself and his stock. In the latter 
resort, the consumption of the crops by human beings implies the 
fact of a population very much larger than would be employed in 
the cultivation of the products consumed ; that the labors of this 
surplus population will be devoted to other industries than agri¬ 
culture ; which leads me to remark that the chief need of our 
