LAYING. 209 



the year, to lay, inasmuch as it seems very hard to pass through 

 the winter without the luxury of eating new-laid eggs." 



The methods adopted by the ancients were, rich and stimu- 

 lant feeding. " Ye must," says Mascall out of Columella, 

 " mixe their meat with chalk, and put water fresche into their 

 troughs with some wine and water mixte, and so let them have 

 it daylye for a space. Or give them of barlye halfe soddan, 

 and mixte with tares, or the graine called millet wheate." 



Lawrence says, " Old hens are seldom to be depended upon 

 for eggs in winter, such being scarcely full of feather until 

 Christmas ; and then, probably, may not begin to lay till 

 April, producing, at last, not more than twenty or thirty 

 eggs." 



M. Reaumur made several experiments with a view to the 

 object in question. "A certain class of food and of seeds," he 

 says, " are much extolled, in many places, as tending to pro- 

 mote the laying of eggs, but nothing has yet been determined 

 in this respect upon rational principle and experiment. I fed 

 some hens, for a whole month together, with hemp-seed, which 

 people pretend to be better adapted than any other food to 

 make them lay. But, in those trials, I did not succeed in pro- 

 curing a single egg." 



" It will be less troublesome, and no less rational," says 

 Dickson, " as pullets commence laying before older hens, and 

 do not moult the first year, to have an early summer brood 

 hatched in April or May, which will begin to lay about Christ- 

 mas. In fact, by attending to the period of hatching, hens 

 may be got to lay all the year. A friend informs us, that a 

 neighbor of his, in this way, has a brood of chickens soon 

 after Christmas, which, by being carefully sheltered from the 

 cold and wet, and fed once a day on boiled potatoes, hot, 

 begin to lay early the ensuing winter." 



" When," says M. Bosc, " it is wished to have eggs during 

 18* 



