THE INTENSIVE PLAN. 149 



been tried, but no ration has been found that will neu- 

 tralize the bad effects which the lack of exercise of the 

 laying birds produces on their eggs. 



In the first edition of "An Egg Farm," the impor- 

 tance of inducing exercise by scratching was inculcated 

 for the first time in print. The reader is reminded that 

 poultry literature is mostly of a very modern date. 

 There have been, down to the present time, about two 

 hundred books and pamphlets printed on poultry, in the 

 English language, but when An Egg Farm was first 

 published, a small but excellent poultry book by Wright, 

 another by Geyelin, and a few other books, very meager 

 ones, comprised all the works on fowl keeping which 

 had then attained any considerable circulation, and 

 nowhere had the importance of scratching, for the sake 

 of exercise, been mentioned though the experience of 

 people with flower beds had, for long centuries previous, 

 shown that the hen is, by nature, a scratching animal, 

 as inveterate in parting the soil as is a duck in parting 

 the water, and more so, in some cases, since the fond- 

 ness for swimming has been bred out of some strains of 

 Pekin ducks, by withholding bathing privileges from 

 them for many consecutive generations. Since our first 

 recommendation, in the original edition of An Egg Farm, 

 as above stated, to furnish a scratching pile or scratch- 

 ing bin, the modern voluminous fowl literature of the 

 country, including the poultry columns in the numerous 

 agricultural periodicals, has reiterated the advice until 

 fowl keepers have become well indoctrinated on this point. 



But, while the use of horserake and hay tedder, for 

 the free range colony system, was pointed out in the 

 first edition, no better way was shown for mixing the 

 grain and straw, in yards or buildings, than to do it by 

 hand. We described the best way we then knew. The 

 advent since, of simple mechanical apparatus, contrived 

 by the author, to accomplish the mixing, constitutes a 



