150 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



eggs to produce it. I have been challenged in this statement, 

 but I have sent letters out until I am tired, and I have received 

 hundreds of answers from people who have kept account both 

 of eggs hatched in an incubator and under hens, and they could 

 not prove that they had exceeded twenty-five living chickens 

 to every hundred eggs. That being the fact, how would it be 

 possible for a man to have ninety-four or ninety-eight per cent, 

 fertility. In the same way if the hens of a poultryman pro- 

 duced thirty-three and one-third per cent, of eggs, it would 

 raise the average of seventy to a point where it would add al- 

 most one hundred and eighty-seven millions of dollars in one 

 jump to the egg product of this country. Those are things that 

 we must look at. If a man has got a hen that will lay one hun- 

 dred and twenty eggs per year, and those eggs are sold in a 

 good fair market, he can make from a dollar to a dollar and a 

 quarter a year on that hen. That is a fact without any stretch 

 of the imagination to lead up to it. If you have a flock of hens 

 that are producing an average of ten each per month of egg 

 yield, you ought to make from a dollar to a dollar and a quarter 

 per year from every one of those hens. You ought to make that 

 much over the cost of feeding the flock and the care of the 

 poultry. 



In the origin of poultry we have simply what might be 

 called the theory of the naturalist. The naturalists of early 

 days were not men of letters or men of great information. 

 They gathered information from what they saw and recorded 

 it as best they knew. Some of these naturalists have accepted 

 the theory that all of the numerous families and varieties of 

 pigeons have descended from one variety known as the Blue 

 Rock pigeon, so plentiful throughout many of the continental 

 countries. We are told that our chickens have descended from 

 one Gallus Bankiva, or the Jungle Fowl of India. Following 

 that original statement comes the discovery of the naturalist 

 who found another jungle fowl which he named Sonnerati. 

 We are taught by these early naturalists that these two were 

 the original ancestors, from which have descended our poul- 

 try. Naturalists again tell us that the most immense animal in 

 the world was that species of elephant called the Mammoth. 

 Later they discovered the great Lizard, and within a few 

 months the naturalists of the Museum of Natural History in 

 New York have discovered one very much larger than any 



