DISEASES AND THEIR CURE. 99 



difficulties of returning each chick to his own mamma, 

 for no other mamma is good enough for him not 

 she. As soon as the poults have learnt to know the 

 cry of the hen and every hen has a different cry, 

 aye, even unto a thousand or more, just the same as 

 every sheep in a flock boasts of a different cast of 

 countenance to that hen will the poults stick, and 

 under no other will they brood ; so that I fear that 

 any thought of a wholesale cure by means of carbolic 

 acid must be dismissed as hopeless, although in the 

 case of a few birds, and where the whole lot can be 

 easily gone through in batches, I should strongly 

 recommend a resort to it ; an iron spoon to burn the 

 acid in, and a common egg basket lined with flannel 

 to hold the patients, being perhaps as cheap and 

 simple a method of application as any other. 



The disease commonly known as the " gapes " so 

 called from the continual gaping or opening of the 

 bills of the chicks affected has its origin, I have little 

 doubt, in noxious inhalations from the land ; in proof 

 of which theory I have to submit the fact that, given 

 several hundred young pheasants in a field, the coops 

 at either end have been known frequently to be free 

 from disease, whilst all the middle ones have been 

 affected, and have had to be transferred to the other 

 ground. Sometimes it may be the middle lot that 

 is found to suffer, and the ends escape, or all may be 

 affected together. No worms, snails, excrement, or 

 noxious vapours in the air to all of which causes this 



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