4G4 Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
nals devoted to their interest, many volumes of printed books, and 
divers essays in our agricultural periodicals; and were I to relate 
the annals of my own personal companionship with them for many 
years past, I should only tell you, that at the present day they are 
both as untamed and uncivilized as when the great patriarch, Noah, 
let them out of his ark to forage among the renewed plants and 
flowers at the foot of Mount Ararat. They live, propagate and 
subsist by instinct alone, and not all the invention or ingenuity of 
man has been able to improve their qualities, to change their habits, 
or invite them to a companionable docility. Even the importation 
of the superior Italian bee into our country in late years, and cross¬ 
ing them on our common stock, has not perceptibly improved their 
habits. So, lovable as they may be in their sweets and wax, they 
are barbarians now, as ever, and equally at home in the hollow 
trunk of a tree in the wildest forest, as in their hives amid the 
flowers of the field, or refinements of the most highly cultivated 
orchard and garden. 
Now, gentlemen, in all this long dissertation, I have probably 
told you nothing new, and little which will prove instructive, or 
even worthy of publication. Yet we have seen that from the rud¬ 
est material at the beginning of our agricultural settlements, we 
have made decided progress in the breeding and cultivation of our 
domestic animals, and that chiefly, within the last century. We 
find that much has thus far been accomplished, and wiih the aids 
and lights now at our disposal, we trust a still more rapid and a 
more widely disseminated progress can be achieved in the future. 
The present value of all our varieties of domestic live stock in 
the United States and its territories maybe safely estimated at two 
thousand millions of dollars, and their annual product of all kinds 
at one thousand millions more. Full thirty per cent, has been 
added to the aggregate per capita value of our graded stock by 
improvements in their breeding within the last fifty years, and at 
no increased cost in their keeping, although those improved ani¬ 
mals as yet extend over only a fractional part of our country. 
What then may be the increased measure of value when — if such 
a thing be possible—that improvement shall embrace the farm- 
stock of our entire broad nationality? It must be almost incalcu¬ 
lable. 
In review of this live-stock history and progress which his been 
