306 OUR DOMESTIC BIRDS 



importance, and before long there were a great many that gave 

 regular employment to editors, advertising solicitors, and sub- 

 scription solicitors, who were employed for their knowledge of 

 poultry and their acquaintance with poultrymen as well as for 

 special qualifications for their respective departments. 



Art. The illustrating of poultry journals and books, and of the 

 catalogues of fanciers and other advertisers in poultry literature, 

 gives employment to a constantly increasing number of artists. 

 In order to successfully portray birds for critical fanciers, an artist 

 must be something of a fancier. It is not enough that he should 

 draw or paint them as he sees them ; he must know how to pose 

 birds of different kinds, types, and breeds so that his pictures 

 will show the proper characteristic poses and show the most 

 important characters to their best advantage. Since the half-tone 

 process of making illustrations was perfected, the greatest demand 

 is for photographic work, but unless an artist is able to work over 

 and complete a defective photograph with brush or pencil, he can- 

 not make this line of work profitable. Most birds are difficult sub- 

 jects to photograph, and only a small proportion of the photographs 

 that are taken can be used without retouching. A photographer 

 may work for an hour to get a bird posed to suit him, and then, 

 just as he presses the bulb, the bird, by a slight movement of 

 the head or foot, may spoil one feature in a photograph that is 

 otherwise all that could be desired. An artist who can draw birds 

 can remedy such defects ; the ordinary commercial artist cannot. 



Invention. The most important invention used in aviculture 

 is the artificial incubator. Methods of hatching eggs by arti- 

 ficial heat were developed independently by the Egyptians and 

 by the Chinese thousands of years ago, and are still used in 

 Egypt and China. The arrangements used in these old hatch- 

 eries are crude, and the success of the operation depends upon 

 exceptional skill and judgment on the part of the operator. 

 Operating incubators is a business continued in the same families 

 for centuries. Each hatchery does the hatching for a community. 



