Among the products of agriculture I of course intended to include the farmer’s stock, and I must here bear my tribute of admiration to the fine display which has been made of horned cattle; particularly of work oxen, remarkable for their size, their adaptation to the purposes for which they are kept and the docility and yet the unflagging spirit which they manifested in the trials of strength and of deep ploughing.  I have not before seen such fine specimens of the Devon cattle,—­of course I speak of them as they present themselves to the eye—­not pretending to judge of their relative value to other stock exhibited.  Improvement in the breed of domestic animals goes hand in hand with agricultural mechanism, to give the ability to make two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before, and thus to render you indeed benefactors.  Skill in the use, and ingenuity in devising and constructing implements, serve to render labor productive, and relieve it of its most dreary drudgery.  It is this mechanical ingenuity which has compensated for the high price of labor among us, and aided in the development of resources which makes our country the greatest of the earth.  Blest by soil, climate and government, if we are, as claimed, pre-eminent among nations, it is because we have added to other advantages a more general cultivation of the mind.  The superiority is attributable not so much to physical energy, activity and perseverance, as to the improvement of that portion of the man which lies above the eyes.

Though you have done much for the improvement of agricultural implements, your work is far from being completed.  It is not a little surprising that we should, to this day, have no reliable rule by which to make a plough, and though the model has been improved, certainly it is yet not unlike, and so far as exact science is concerned, is on a par with that implement as used by the Romans, and as it appeared in ancient architecture; the form, proportion and angular relation of the parts, and the adjustment of the whole to the power to be applied, offer problems alike interesting to the mechanic, and useful to the cultivator.  In your ploughing matches sufficient evidence was afforded of the fitness of the implements employed to turn deep and wide furrows; but should we be content with such result as is obtained by trying different models, and then copying one which is found to be good?

Maine was so richly endowed with harbors and forests of ship timber that it was naturally to be expected, as it has fallen out, that the pursuits of navigation would most occupy the attention of her people.  But let not her sons look to the period when her forests have disappeared as that beyond which her prosperity may not continue.  There are large tracts of land which when labor is no longer directed to lumber, will become, in the hands of the farmer, what the valley of the Kennebec now is.  The land may not offer soil so deep as alluvial districts, nor be at first