128 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 



that they did not mean to fatten, but this was of rare 

 occurrence, and proceeded, no doubt, from some ailment 

 beyond my powsr of discovering ; but, fat or otherwise, 

 they were never tough. To boil the rice in buttermilk 

 is by far preferable to boiling it in water; let the fowls 

 be as young as you can, if of full growth. Many people 

 run away with an impression that fowls fed on rice will 

 go blind ; it is dirt and sourness that cause it. How 

 often do we see a trough loaded with meal food, suffi- 

 cient for two or three days, placed before the unhappy 

 prisoner in the pen, who cannot escape from it, nor seek 

 other and sweeter food ! When the fowls have done 

 feeding, the trough should be removed.* cleaned, and ex- 

 posed to the air until the next day's feeding time. At 

 my factory, in India, the troughs were every afternoon 

 thrown into a pond; there they remained until next 

 morning, when, after an hour or two's sunning, they 

 were returned to the coops ; no blindness was known 

 there." 



EXPERIMENTS WITH BOILED GRAINS IN FATTENING- 

 FOWLS. 



IT is the custom of poultry keepers, in France, to cook 

 the grain given to fowls which they intend to fatten, 

 boiling it in water till it is soft enough to be easily 

 bruised between the fingers, the boiling causing it to 

 swell till the farina splits the enveloping membrane, and 

 this they term bursting. Although it is the popular 

 opinion that burst grain is better than when it is dry, 

 for fattening poultry, this opinion has probably not been 

 established on accurate experiments. Be this as it may, 

 it is of no less importance to ascertain whether there is 

 any difference of expense in feeding poultry on dry or 

 on burst grain ; that is, whether, under similar circum- 

 stances, fowls eat more or less of one than of the other. 



In order to ascertain this, M. Reaumur ordered four 

 pint measures of each of the six common sorts of grain 

 to be boiled till they were well burst, and he found that 

 the increase of bulk in each sort was the following : 



