No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 299 



eat until they did. Any poultryman knows, who watches his hens, 

 that they will begin to eat more for two or three weeks before they 

 begin to lay because it takes that long for the eggs to develop; and 

 this proves it. We have examined hundreds of hens and we lind the 

 rule holds good, that the hen will first begin increasing in the con- 

 sumption of food, then increasing in her weight and then she will in- 

 crease in egg production. The best condition for egg production is 

 when a hen has surplus fat on the body. A poor hen cannot lay. Tboy 

 must have some surplus fat with which to make the first. 



The hen shown in Fig. 32 is a good one. We discovered her in a 

 moulting experiment. This hen was the last one of them to moult. tShe 

 moulted on the 28th of November. She had laid 213 eggs in ten 

 months and was the last hen to moult in a fiock of over 2U0 and the 

 best hen we had. In looking up the egg records of other hens we find 

 that almost invariably the best laying hens we had are the ones that 

 moult last, and the poorest layers we had were the ones that moulted 

 first. And here all these years you and 1 have been killing otf every 

 fall the best hens because we have picked out the early moulters be- 

 cause we thought by virtue of early moulting that they would be the 

 best early winter layers. We have found also that not only do the 

 last moulting hens lay most but they also take a shorter time to moult 

 than the hens that moult early. 



Fig. 33 is a picture showing the development of the egg, the ovary 

 and oviduct, liight here in the ovary is where the disease of white 

 diarrhea occurs. When the yolk breaks from the follicle and falls into 

 the ovasack and comes down here and passes along where the albumen 

 is deposited, the shell of the egg is laid on. A moment ago I stated 

 the fact that the hen must have surplus fat in her body in order to lay 

 well. This is the proof. The first part of the egg developed is this 

 little yolk in the follicle, and there are many hundreds, 1,500 or more 

 of these contained in the ovary along the spire. 04 per cent, and more 

 of the dry matter in these yolks is fat and unless tbe hen has surplus 

 fat in her body to develop the ovum, then she cannot lay, so that if we 

 are going to get eggs we must give the hen an abundance of food so that 

 she has the available nutrients to develop the ovum. We must have 

 the right kind of material to manufacture the egg. 



In Fig. 34 is shown one of the results of our experiment in which we 

 undertook to find out what place inside of a hen. Governor Hoard 

 sa^'s the darkest place in the world is the inside of a cow. 1 beg to dif- 

 fer with the Governor because just as dark a place is inside the hen. 



A red dye due known as Soudan II was mixed with the food and ab- 

 sorbed into the body and in that way the dye affected the egg and here 

 we can count up the red rings on the yolk and tell how many days it 

 took to develop. We find it took ten days to fourteen days to develop 

 from that small ovum up to the full size yolk of the egg. We found 

 that another dye, Ehodamme red, doe-s not affect the color of the fat of 

 the egg but does color the white of the egg; hence we can tell what 

 takes place in both the white and the yolk of the egg. When the egg 

 is incubated and the chicken hatched we find this interesting thing 

 takes place. In Fig. 35 is a picture of a little chicken hatched from 

 an ecrg where the mother had been fed on Soudan 111 and you will 

 notice that the chicken has manufactured the fat of the yoke of the egg 

 over into the fat of its own body. That fat is ordinarily found on 

 the inside of the chicken. 



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