284 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



from side to side also from the back to the keel. These, generally 

 then, are the main factors indicating low vitality. Primarily the 

 differences are in the body capacity. Look for small body capacity, 

 with low vitality, as contiasted with a very large, heavy body capacity 

 with high vitality. 



Perhaps you can see that better represented in Fig. 2 by super-im- 

 posing two Plymouth Rocks, one over the other. The low vitality 

 bird is in white and the high vitality bird is in black. Now these were 

 birds of the same age, and as you will see, almost of the same height, 

 yet there were at least 2 pounds or more difference in weight. You 

 will notice that all of the general characters that I mentioned in 

 the previous slides are true here. Take this low vitality bird for ex- 

 ample; there is a long, thin, flat beak, a thin neck, a thin keel, and a 

 tucked up abdomen. There are the long legs and long shanki as com- 

 pared to the high vitality individual that has such wonderful depth 

 from back to abdomen, from back to keel, a heavy neck with a well 

 rounded head, a medium to large comb, a heavy curved beak, 

 heavy shanks. There in black is a high vitality bird. He is a splen- 

 did specimen of a Plymouth Rock from a constitutional vigor stand- 

 point. This male unquestionably showed these characters from a baby 

 chick right on up to full maturity and is worth infinitely more to 

 kill to eat than the other one. He is a perfectly good specimen from the 

 standpoint of his vitality for breeding purposes. The low vitality 

 bird would not be worth anything from a breeding standpoint. 

 Perhaps you can see the same idea brought out a little more graphi- 

 cally with the same individuals from a different photograph. (Pig. 

 3.) Here are the same two Barred Plymouth Rocks shown separately. 

 By placing a parallelogram of the same size over the low vitality 

 bird that you do over the high vitality bird here, you can see that 

 the high vitality individual has a tendency to fill the parallelogram; 

 the breast is full and deep so that it nearly fills it in front, and 

 the abdomen is so full that it nearly fills it at the rear. We see 

 that a bird of high vitality has the tendency to fill a parallelogram 

 while a bird of low vitality is deficient in breast and abdomen. No- 

 tice the difference between that vacancy in the parallelogram at the 

 breast and abdomen. That is the most convincing view you can 

 get of birds of high or low vitality, and the same contrast would be 

 true if you were looking at the birds from the rear or from the front, 

 because the bird of high vitality is broad across the back and 

 keel as compared to the bird of low vitality, w^hich has a narrow 

 back, narrow keel and is narrow between the legs. Frequently birds 

 of low vitality have legs so close together that they nearly interfere. 

 The bird of high vitality viewed from the front, the rear or the ■ide 

 fills a parallelogram while the bird of low vitality is more likely to 

 fill a triangle. The same thing is true of the baby chicks. There is 

 a baby chick (Fig. 4A) that is full of vigor, hard, full, round and 

 plump, with an abundance of down lying close to the body. Here is 

 another one. A, with its eye standing right out like a shoe button, the 

 eye is full and expressive, the beak well curved and of good color, the 

 chicken vigorous and active. One could have observed the vitality of 

 these chickens even more accurately in life than by photographs. There 

 is a chicken marked B of the same hatch, out of the same incubator. 

 It has low vitality, and is a weak yeeping individual that probably 

 will not live long; if it does live, it will be a "delusion and a snare" 



