38 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



waist, or it is a different temperature that you get on your 

 hands and your face. The heated air rises, of course. I found 

 those houses very comfortable. That set my mind at rest as to 

 any wind coming in around those fowls. The very fact that 

 they turned their backs towards it satisfied me that they were 

 not uncomfortable. Of course, we all know that cattle and 

 horses will put their backs to a storm. Poultry are not built 

 that way. If hens were to turn their backs to a storm, or a 

 strong wind, they would get chilled right down to the skin. 



Last winter we had no trouble at all from those fresh air 

 houses, so that this winter, having liked them so well, I had 

 several more built. The birds in the fresh air houses are lay- 

 ing just as many, if not more eggs than they are in the closed 

 houses, or in the semi-closed houses, because I never close a 

 window. They are all perfectly healthy. I never even see a 

 case of snufiles. I do not believe that hens ever get the snuffles 

 from being kept in a fresh air house. We did find on one 

 plant a man who claimed he had had some difficulty from that 

 source. I asked him to look and see if those fowls went to 

 roost at night. He did look, and he told me about a week or 

 ten days afterwards, he says : " Doctor, you are right on that 

 point. I found those birds underneath the roosts at night. I 

 think they are going to get over it." Right after that came a 

 letter from Professor Brooks — I think it was Professor 

 Brooks of ■xA.mherst — in which he said that he had had a 

 whole lot of birds that were roupy, that had had a bad cold, 

 and he was thoroughly disgusted with the results he had ob- 

 tained from using various cure-alls. Finally he put the birds 

 out in an open shed, and he said that they could live or die. 

 They lived. They cured the roup themselves. Their consti- 

 tutions were all right, and the result was that they got rid of 

 the disease simply by the application of plenty of fresh air and 

 sunlight. Now I do not claim that you can cure all diseases 

 v/ith fresh air and sunlight, but you can, if you will, keep your 

 fowls pretty close to nature, and if you do, you can be prac- 

 tically sure that you will keep them free from disease. You 

 do not need to have any disease on your poultry plant. It is a 

 disgrace to any man to have a lot of sick chickens unless in 

 some way he is caught with an epidemic. When everything is 

 musty and mouldy, and some filthy poultry plant is started, 

 and the people have carried the infection from that plant to 



