268 AN EGG FARM. 



devoted twenty years to artificial incubation says : " Take 

 the eggs out from the egg chamber to turn them, to 

 afford a change of air;" while another expert who has 

 studied the matter an equal length of time insists that 

 turning should take place inside the machine and all 

 exposure to cool air religiously avoided. One master of 

 the art says tfre temperature of the egg chamber should 

 be 102 and another prescribes 103. One recommends 

 providing moisture by keeping shallow pans of water 

 near the eggs during the whole term previous to the 

 18th day, while a third never supplies any moisture 

 whatever, and a fourth would supply it or omit it accord- 

 ing to the results of tests made between the twelfth and 

 nineteenth days. 



In regard to the method of turning eggs, there is a 

 school of operators who insist that eggs must be gently 

 rolled and that inverting the trays in which they are 

 kept is unnatural and injurious, while another school 

 advocates turning the trays as the quickest and easiest 

 way, claiming that so long as the eggs are turned over it 

 makes no difference how the revolution is accomplished. 

 On the question of ventilation, one inventor exults in 

 his method of a small, constant stream of air admitted 

 near the bottom of his incubator and escaping at the 

 top, and another, while providing apertures at the top, 

 closes them with valves which open automatically, gov- 

 erned by a regulator, to allow heated air to escape when 

 the temperature rises beyond a certain degree ; and still 

 another denounces all top apertures, claiming that in car- 

 rying off hot air they also carry off moisture and dry the 

 eggs too much, and he would ventilate only very slowly 

 and through holes in the egg chamber floor. A legion 

 of incubator makers claim that the regulators to their 

 respective machines govern the heat perfectly, leaving 

 nothing to be desired, while one solitary individual in 

 the United States, who makes and sells an incubator 



