OCCUPATIONS RELATED TO AVICULTURE 307 



In the early part of the eighteenth century a French scientist 

 named Reaumur, who was much interested in poultry, began to 

 make experiments in artificial hatching and brooding. In 1750 

 he published a very full account of these and other experiments 

 which he had made with poultry. His idea was to devise a modi- 

 fication of the Egyptian practice of hatching in ovens, suited to 

 the conditions of a more advanced civilization. He succeeded in 

 hatching eggs by utilizing the waste heat from a baker's oven, 

 and also hatched eggs in hotbeds heated with decomposing 

 manure. He applied the hotbed principle to the brooding of 

 chickens with some success. But the methods that he devised 

 were not adapted to general use. 



After Reaumur many others experimented with artificial hatch- 

 ing. Some of the ideas were obviously more impractical than 

 those of Reaumur, but the experimenters tried them out and 

 sometimes succeeded in hatching chickens by very peculiar 

 and laborious processes. One man in England, in the latter 

 part of the eighteenth century, hatched some chickens from eggs 

 placed in cotton batting in a sieve adjusted over a charcoal fire 

 in a small fireplace. The fire was watched constantly for three 

 weeks, either by himself or by some member of his family. He 

 demonstrated that eggs could be hatched in this way, but not 

 that it could be done profitably. Practical incubators were not 

 produced until about forty years ago. 



Although incubators and brooders have been brought to a 

 relatively high state of efficiency, they are far from perfect. In- 

 ventors of the best machines are still studying ways to improve 

 them. In this and many other fields there are opportunities for 

 inventive genius. 



Education and investigation. Lectures on poultry have been 

 given occasionally at agricultural institutes in the United States 

 since about 1860. After 1890 the demand for such lectures, 

 and the number given, constantly increased, and ability to speak 

 in public became valuable to one versed in aviculture. Then the 



