FOURTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X. 699 



(From the U. S. Census for the year of 1909.) 



The American Eagle may perch serenely upon the back of our silver 

 dollars, but it takes the great American Hen to make the dollars for the 

 eagle to perch upon. 



Uncle Sam's last census, taken in 1910, says that in the preceding 

 year there were 488,468,354 fowls raised, worth $202,506,272. He also 

 tells us that during the same year the American hen laid 1,591,311,371 

 dozens of eggs, worth $306,688,960; total poultry value 1509,195,232. 



But, these figures are too big for our ordinary little minds — we don't 

 grasp their meaning. We know how big an egg is, or how many we 

 can eat on Easter, but, when people talk about billions of dozens, it is 

 beyond us. We don't know whether we could put all those eggs in 

 our barn or whether there are so many that we couldn't pile them all 

 in the back pasture. 



Let us see if we cannot get a little better idea of the real size of our 

 annual crop of "hen-fruit" than it is possible to obtain from a long 

 string of figures. 



When you tell about the size of the fish you almost caught, you say 

 that "it was as long as the table," or "it would reach half-way across the 

 room." Thus, it is only by comparing unknown objects with things which 

 are familiar that we can obtain a real knowledge of their size. 



In the first place an ordinary crate in which eggs are packed for 

 shipping holds thirty dozen. It is two feet long, one foot wide and one 

 foot high, which makes two cubic feet. Hence one cubic foot holds fifteen 

 dozen eggs. A simple calculation shows that it would take 106,087,425 

 cubic feet to hold the eggs showered upon the United States in one year 

 by the American hen. 



But still those figures are too big for us, so we'll have to go to the 

 barn, or something else with which we are familiar. 



I don't know how big your barn is, but if it is 80x80 feet and 20 feet 

 high to the eaves, it is a good sized barn and contains 128,000 cubic feet. 

 You are probably thinking that you could pack all the eggs in the coun- 

 try in a barn that size. But, hold on a minute. They say that "figures 

 don't lie" and the figures say that it would require 828 such barns, 

 packed solid to the eaves as close as eggs are packed in a shipping crate, 

 to hold all the eggs laid in a single year. And even then you would 

 have a few thousand dozens left over for omelets, or to hatch out 

 chickens for next year. 



It would require 41,440 ordinary box cars, packed to the roof, or a 

 solid train 345 miles long to haul the annual egg crop. A train of this 

 length w'ould just about reach from Chicago to Des Moines, going west, 

 or from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio, headed east. There sure would be 

 a mess if such a train were wrecked! 



Talk about your great pyramids of Egypt— they are great all right, but 

 the American hen furnishes material every year to build a pyramid a 

 quarter of a mile square at the base and over 182 feet high. 



Truly the American hen is some bird. She sits on the barnyard 

 fence and cackles to the accompaniment of the piano which she has 

 placed in the parlor for the farmer's daughter, or she mingles her con- 



