not have his day book, his ledger, his invoices and his balance sheets. To pursue any other course would be to court failure, to insure financial ruin. But how is it with the farmer? How many of us can tell the amount of our capital? How much in land, how much in stock and how much in tools? What is our gross income and what part of it is due to interest on capital, what part the price of labor and what part for incidental expenses and what for taxes? How many of us can tell the actual or relative cost of a pound of beef or pork or butter or wool; what it has cost us to produce our wheat, our corn, our oats or our hay? How many can tell what it costs to keep a farm team for a year, a cow, a steer, a sheep or a hog? And if some of us at times have attempted a rough estimate of the profits of our farms, how much credit have we given it for the use of our homes, how much for fuel, for vegetables and fruit, for bread and butter and pork? How much for keeping those horses we have used more for pleasure than for work? The answer to these and a hundred like questions would be exactly the same "I don't know, I guess it is about so and so." But were you still further to ask, "Don't you keep a book account?" the most of us would answer, "Oh, yes," and we would produce out of the pocket of some cast-off coat a soiled and greasy book, smaller than a cigar case, covered all over inside with names and dates and figures and scratches and marks in promiscuous confusion, which to any one but the owner would be as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on a Chinese tea chest. My friends, I am not preaching. I am only speaking in meeting; I am telling tales out of school; I am making personal confession. The lessons I am trying to teach are the lessons I most feel the need of learning. It must be obvious to the dullest of us that the same accurate financial knowledge, deemed so indispensable to the success of the manufacturer, the merchant and the railroad manager, would be of equal benefit to the farmer. Our business is equally important as theirs. We employ more men and more capital than any one, if not more than all combined. Such knowledge would enable us farmers to understand our exact financial condition; to determine the amount of our income, and the sources from which it is derived; to know what part of our business was paying a profit, and what we were doing at a loss, and thus we would be better able to shape our course. It would show us where our money went, and it might enable us to do more at less expense; to lessen our outgoes without decreasing our comfort. And is there any reason why farmers may not have as thorough financial knowledge of their business as do other men of theirs? It would no doubt cost some effort to keep such accounts as I have indicated, but the keeping of them would alone be worth more than the cost, simply as an educator, to say nothing of the knowledge acquired by them. It would teach us to be more methodical and systematic. Our perceptions would be clearer, and we should be able to lay our plans with more precision, and with more reasonable assurance of success. It would do more for us than has thus far been done by all the agricultu ral colleges in the country. There is in the minds of some of us a strong prejudice against book farming, but if we wrote our own books, perhaps we should study them more and prize them better. Another way in which we can do much to improve and elevate our business is to make some particular branch of farming a specialty. Not that we should confine ourselves exclusively to it, but that we should make it a leading business, to which all our other farm operations are subservient and secondary. No two farmers are situated so exactly alike as to be able to pursue the same methods in farming with equal success. Let every one of us therefore study our surroundings, the character of our farms, the amount of our capital, our own capacity and tastes, and then in the carrying out of a thoroughly matured, well designed plan, in some one branch of our business strive to excel. Let us make this particular branch a special study, so that we shall not only know more about it, but also be able to do it better than anybody else. By pursuing such a course we shall not only be more pecuniarily successful, but we shall exert an influence in favor of the business of our choice and thus improve and elevate it. The sun may shine so faintly that there may be a chill in the air, yet with a sun glass we may so condense its rays, so bring them to a focus, that we can set a house on fire. So the weakest of us by concentrating our energies upon a single branch of our business may awaken an interest, may kindle an enthusiasm that shall wake up a whole neighborhood, and be felt throughout the town. It is in this way that most of our improvements in farming have been effected. Fowler and Warner with their hogs, Cook and Paul and Clark with their sheep, Doubleday with his trotters, Cobb with his cattle feeding, and every dairyman worthy the name, throughout the country, are living examples of this principle I am trying to enforce. If, in connection with this special attention to some one branch. of our business, we should fix in our minds some definite standard of excellence toward which we would strive, it would still further aid us in making progress. There is not an owner of a trotter in the whole county who is not doing his best to make his horse beat 2:11 minutes, and in so doing he acts wisely. But how many of our dairy men are trying to beat Jersey Bell's seven hundred and five pounds in one year? We certainly shall not unless we try. Thus far, every American farmer, if he had any Yankee blood in his veins, has combined in his own person the business of farming with that of land speculator. Whether this peculiarity is inherited, or is the result of his internal convictions that he is a sovereign and therefore ought to own a kingdom, I am unable to say. One thing is certain, that if by chance the rise of his land has made him a richer man, he has with unvarying certainty become a poorer farmer, and a slave to his land. We go this way but once. Why should we burden ourselves with more than we have strength or means to carry? All capital invested in farming may be comprised under two heads, fixed capital, or that invested in lands and buildings, and working capital, represented by labor, by stock, and tools and seed. Fixed capital is always unproductive unless combined with a just proportion of working capital, and as a rule the more working capital we use in proportion to our fixed capital, the greater the profits. When we have thoroughly mastered this truth, we shall have taken a long step toward developing the resources of our farms, and increased prosperity in our business. Our improvements thus far have been mainly in the direction of increased productions by the aid of mechanical appliances. We shall in the future bave more need to study how best to convert the products of our fields into beef and pork, into butter and wool. The science of feeding for a specific end has thus far received but little attention. I can but believe that a knowledge and application of the chemical forces of nature will yet do as much, if not more, to advance our business than has been effected by a knowledge and application of mechanical forces, illustrated by the labor saving machinery on exhibition here to-day. Chemical knowlege has taught the railroads to convert their iron into steel. It will yet teach us to convert our straw stacks into valuable feed, and it will teach us at the same time so to combine our more valuable products as greatly to increase their value. But I need not enumerate methods of improvement. There is not a farmer in Walworth county who does not know how to farm better than he does. If we did as well as we knew we should do better than we ever have. We, any of us, know better than to house our tools for winter in the field where we last used them, or in our barnyards. And I sometimes think that the benefit we have received by the use of farm machinery has in many cases been more than neutralized by recklessness in using and carelessness in caring for them. What we farmers most need is to be more thoroughly in love with our business, more enthusiastic in pursuing it, a firmer belief in its innate nobleness. All branches of business are alike honorable that are alike useful, but we rank those highest that require the greatest executive ability, the most learning, the highest intellectual and moral qualities. Measured by these two standards, its usefulness and as a field in which to put forth both physical and intellectual effort, farming ought to outrank all professions and all trades. Some of these may furnish greater scope to certain talents in a given direction, but our business, if pursued as it ought, will lead to the perfect development of the whole man, physically, intellectually, morally, which after all is the final legitimate end of all human endeavor. Farmers of Walworth county, ours is a calling worthy of the highest ambition, and our county is an inviting field in which we may labor successfully for its highest development. The lines have fallen to us in pleasant places We have a goodly heritage. Let us not despise or undervalue it, but let us use it wisely, that we may transuit it not only unimpaired, but made better to those who may come after us. A heritage not alone of houses and of lands, of flocks and of herds, of bank stock and of bonds, but of public benefactions built up and sustained by our efforts, of institutions preserved and perpetuated by our labors, of a government under whose administration the rights of labor shall be as sacred as the rights of capital, whose broad and benignant shield shall insure equal rights and equal privileges to all, be they men or be they women, white or black, home bred or foreign born, under which a wrong done to the humblest individual shall be a wrong done to the state a heritage of homes made of double worth by all the hallowed memories, that our lives have caused to cluster around them. WEATHER NOTES. The following weather statistics were furnished by Mr. George J. Kellogg, the Janesville nurseryman, for the Transactions : During the month of January, 1881, the thermometer registered degrees as follows: NOTE. 12 below. Jan. 29. 24 below. 0 16 above. 18 above. Twenty-two days at zero and below, aggregating 281 degrees below. The coldest month in the last twenty-five years was February, 1875, during which the mercury was below zero for twenty days, aggregating three hundred and twenty-four degrees below. January, 1881, ranks next with twenty-two days below, aggregating |