64 FRENCH PRACTICE FOOD. 



game hens began to lay as soon as their chickens 

 were three weeks old ; the consequence of high keep 

 and good attendance of the cocks. 



A correspondent in France (1815) informed me, 

 that my little book had reached that country, so ce- 

 lebrated for poultry, and that the good housewives 

 of France made themselves very merry with my 

 practice of restricting the cock to so few as half-a- 

 dozen hens, their allowance being twenty, or even 

 twenty-five. The French Naturalists also in their 

 new Dictionary, I find, have copied and recom- 

 mended this liberal practice. What difference, in 

 such respect, may subsist between the soil or animals 

 of England and France, I am not qualified to deter- 

 mine ; I can only assure the reader that my rule is 

 the result of long and actual experience. A certain 

 English traveller, twenty years since, brought home 

 and published an account almost equally extraordi- 

 nary of French men. That point also, I leave to abler 

 judges. As to poultry keepers in any country, it 

 will readily be believed that they make few experi- 

 ments, and still fewer records ; and the keeper of two 

 or three score hens, at any rate breeding a consider- 

 able stock from such a number, does not trouble 

 himself to investigate the merits of his practice, sa- 

 tisfied that it is according to the established mode. 



QUANTITIES OF FOOD. By an experiment made 

 in July, 1 806, a measured peck of good barley kept 

 in a high style of condition, the following stock, con- 

 fined, and having no other provision : one cock, 

 three hens, three March chickens, six April, and six 

 May ditto, during eight clear days, and one feed 



