THE INCUBATOR ROOM. 299 



sitating sprinkling the eggs every few hours to prevent 

 their ruin. Too much ventilation of your cellar should 

 not be allowed, for with every admission of air, changes 

 of temperature are liable to occur. Have just enough to 

 keep the air reasonably pure. The floor should be pref- 

 erably of carefully smoothed cement, permitting an occa- 

 sional scrubbing. It is best to have windows enough so 

 that the thermometers may be read easily and the win- 

 dows should be doubled, or at all events cased and fitted 

 very carefully, to guard against both ingress and egress 

 of air. For egg testing, it will be found an excellent 

 plan to have a side door leading to a small room, which 

 may be warmed to the temperature previously directed. 



THE IKCUBATOR OF THE FUTURE. 



The teasel, with its elastic natural hooks, cannot be 

 equaled for cloth manufacturers' use in combing fine 

 fibers of wool, by any artificial hooks or springs of the 

 most delicate mechanism the art of man has yet pro- 

 duced in trials lasting through centuries, and as this is 

 a triumph of merely a humble plant, so the feathers of 

 the sitting bird of the animal kingdom, higher up in the 

 scale of life, can never be equaled by human ingenuity. 

 Incubators of ordinary size, holding a few hundred or a 

 thousand eggs, but too small for the attendant himself to 

 enter, have been made better and better for thirty years, 

 till the best of these are hardly susceptible of further 

 improvement, unless, indeed, a way is found to make the 

 walls of the egg chamber of feathers or of some other 

 material permeable to carbolic acid gas, yet resisting air 

 currents, and so good a non-conductor as to retain heat 

 well. There comes a time when an ordinary material 

 product of man's skill reaches its culminating point. 

 Plows, for instance, have been improved from the initial 

 crooked root or snag of wood through numerous stages 



