Home Production of Poultry . 339 



time, they have been reckoned for the last six years at (js. per 

 120, which is also the wholesale price in France. At this 

 figure we must have imported last year no less than 910,000/. 

 worth of eggs. This year the value will most likely exceed a 

 million sterling. 



With regard to birds, the Board of Trade returns have not 

 noticed them since 1856 ; but for that, and the previous two 

 years we received in value as follows : 38,870/. in 1854, 42,075/. 

 in 1855, and 48,230/. in 1856. There is good reason for 

 believing that this increase of about 25 per cent, in three years 

 has been maintained, and if so, the importation in 1865 was 

 something like 90,000/. Adding this to the 910,000/. for eggs, 

 it appears that there was landed on our shores last year a million 

 pounds' worth of produce that we could have raised with the 

 greatest ease in our own country ; while every year is telling 

 more and more to our discredit. That sound and searching 

 authority, M. de Lavergne, in his ' Rural Economy of England,' 

 <Scc., made an approximative estimate of the number and value 

 of our birds, setting down the annual production of the United 

 Kingdom at 800,000/. ; and if this be anything near the truth, 

 then, allowing for an increase of production in the ten years 

 since Lavergne wrote, we are now actually importing a total 

 of poultry and eggs equalling in value all that we rear and feed 

 and collect at home ! Cannot we just double our results, and 

 thus keep in our own hands the sum of over 1,000,000/. a-year, 

 which we are at present paying to France, Holland, Belgium, 

 Switzerland, and Italy? Cannot we compete with foreigners 

 under the disadvantage of having to convey their fragile and 

 perishable commodities over long journeys and voyages, with 

 the expense of commission agents at the distant market, and a 

 duty of a penny a dozen levied upon their eggs ? 



That this branch of rural industry really is capable of immense 

 development in Great Britain and in Ireland, appears from the 

 example of other countries, such as Belgium and France ; and 

 is proved, indeed, by what certain of our own poultry districts 

 are already doing. Lavergne takes the poultry produce of France 

 at ten times that of the British Isles, or at eight millions sterlino- 

 and in the 'Journal d' Agriculture Pratique' for January 5, last 

 year, he brings the annual value of French eggs and fowls up to 

 ten millions sterling. We wonder still more, however, at the figures 

 of M. Pomme, of the Societe Imperial d'Acclimatisation, in a 

 paper ' Sur les Races Gallines,' translated in last year's 'Journal 

 of the Bath and West of England Society.' He says, " According 

 to ' The Universal Dictionary of Natural History ' — a work of great 

 and legitimate authority — France annually produces 7000 millions 

 of eggs. Estimated at the average value of seven and a-half 



