270 AN EGG FARM. 



If artificial hatching and rearing is so superior to the 

 natural mode, as is persistently claimed by many advo- 

 cates of the machines, including some who are not inter- 

 ested in their manufacture or sale, why should there be 

 such contradictions ? The fact that there are so many 

 mutually destructive criticisms of methods proves that 

 all is not plain sailing. The real truth is that the nat- 

 ural machine is as much superior to the mechanical 

 incubator and the brooder as the construction of the 

 human body transcends that of a watch or a dynamo. 

 All that should be claimed in imitating the hen fry a 

 machine is that we may approach but never reach the 

 perfect regulation of her animal heat and the ventila- 

 tion afforded by those wonderful appendages, her feath- 

 ers, with their matchless quality as non-conductors of 

 heat, their almost impalpable weight and their innumer- 

 able valves or shutters. Besides furnishing an egg 

 chamber with top and sides composed, as we may say, 

 entirely of delicate shutters, nature has an engineer on 

 duty day and night to attend these shutters in an emer- 

 gency, and give them a greater motion than common. 

 The art of man could never succeed to all eternity in 

 making one like all the millions of shutters, as we have 

 called them, or ventilation doors, each held by springs 

 vastly more delicate than the hair spring of a watch and 

 a millionth of a grain in weight. 



Do not use a cheap incubator. A good one cannot 

 possibly be constructed cheaply. Von Culin says : 



" The great demand for incubators and brooders has tempted sash 

 manufacturers, makers of show cases and others, to get out various 

 boxes, cases, tanks and barrels, with various attachments, and call 

 them incubators or hatchers. Some buy a lot of almost expired 

 patents, and boom the new machine on the reputation of the old one, 

 to which the patents originally applied, while the new machine pos- 

 sesses none of the good points of the old one, which to build would 

 cost considerably more than the new one is sold for. Many of this 

 class never had any merit, and went out of the market, but new ones 

 bob up along the line, have their clay of deceit and disappear. Watch 

 for them." 



