INTRODUCTORY. 7 



and another file to rake and bind. The price, of the 

 ponderous thing is greater than what cradles and rakes 

 would cost. The farmer pays his harvesting bills for 

 eight or ten years in advance when he buys a reaping 

 machine that will last that length of time ; that is, he 

 hires fewer harvest hands for eight or ten years. His 

 grain is cut, virtually, before it is sown. It is cut in a 

 machine shop one thousand miles away ; the reapers 

 wear aprons and paper caps, and work cutting the farm- 

 er's grain in a factory he never sees ; their wages are 

 higher per diem than what cradlers would get, but his 

 harvesting costs him 'less the new way, or there would 

 be no labor saving about it. Just so in the new system 

 of poultry keeping by machinery; there is the mechan- 

 ic's bill at the outset. The machines will last many 

 years ; those which are indoors will last during the 

 poultry man's lifetime. If the wages of the mechanics 

 who construct them, including interest, amount to less 

 than the wages of employes saved or superseded during 

 the twenty or fifty years the apparatus lasts, interest on 

 the w r ages included, then there is labor saving. Xow, 

 in any line of industry, no good machinery, well adapted 

 to accomplish the work for which it was designed, ever 

 yet failed to save labor, and the poultry machinery 

 described in this book saves a greater per cent of labor 

 than does the average farm machinery. 



