PO UL TR T- CRAFT. 147 



Good food and good care are not less important than good stock, but come 

 later in order of time ; and to justify their use one must give them to good 

 stock. Food and care, though of the best, cannot make a good layer of a hen 

 that is constitutionally a poor layer ; or put a round full breast on the 

 descendant of a line of flat breasted fowls ; or clean color on the offspring of 

 a race weak in color. It is in the failure to carefully select the specimens used 

 in the breeding pens that most breeders, not merely most breeders of Stand- 

 ard fowls, but most breeders, most people who hatch and rear fowls, fail 

 to make their work pay. 



197. The Common Mistake. One who keeps a dozen hens in his 

 back yard and rears annually sixty to seventy chicks, selects a good male bird, 

 perhaps paying a good price for him, then hatches from the eggs of the entire 

 flock. His hens are a fair average of their kind, not uniform either in appear- 

 ance or quality, some fairly good, some poor. That is about as such flocks 

 run. According to the common theory, as the best hens lay the most eggs, 

 and throw the strongest chicks, the greater proportion of the chicks reared 

 will be from those best hens. That theory takes for granted several things 

 that may not be so. The result desired is not impossible; it is improbable, 

 if the eggs are hatched, as they usually are in such cases, by hens. See how 

 it works. One point of improvement is to be prolificacy. The best and 

 earliest layers are not always the first to go broody, but they are very likely to 

 be. They are set on eggs from the flock. If any of their own eggs happen 

 to be in the lot, such eggs are the poorest they had laid. These hens incubate 

 for three weeks, remain with the broods for six or eight weeks more. So it 

 happens that nearly all the chicks reared are from the poorer hens. Is it any 

 wonder that results in grading up scrub stock and improving stock of poor 

 quality are not always satisfactory? Selection implies separation. Separa- 

 tion is the object of selection. If two or three or more of the best of a dozen 

 hens are separated from the flock, the poultry keeper can know that he is 

 breeding from those hens, and no others. 



1 98. The Farmer's Mistake. It is a very usual practice for a farmer 

 having a flock of, say, one hundred hens, when buying blood to improve his 

 stock, to buy six or eight males of the dollar-and-a-half to two-dollar kind to 

 run with the flock ; then use for hatching eggs collected from the flock. The 

 chances are against any considerable number of the few hundreds of chicks 

 reared being from the best hens. If twelve or fifteen of the best had been 

 separated from the general flock for the breeding season, and mated with a 

 male worth two of the kind used, the eggs from these hens only could have 

 been set, and more improvement made in the stock in one year than by follow- 

 ing the hit and miss method for three. 



199. The Breeder's Mistake. Many breeders of pure bred stock, who 

 breed from a single pen, will use in that pen anything they may happen to 



