114 POULTRY CULTURE 



curtains of cotton cloth and burlap exposed to the weather were 

 rotted out, it was not uncommon to delay renewing them, and no 

 bad effects seemed to follow. Such things, and numerous instances 

 remembered or observed of flocks of fowls doing well through cold 

 winters in mere shells of houses, gradually broke down in many 

 minds the notion that fowls must have warm houses, until, in the 

 early years of this century, progressive poultry keepers began to 

 realize that many of the despised makeshifts and flimsy structures 

 of more primitive times, and of shiftless poultry keepers of their 

 own times, were essentially better than their best structures designed 

 according to principles upon which they had been working. 



Houses with open fronts. In these, as is to be expected, con- 

 siderable variety is found, but in general a house of this type 

 belongs to one of two classes : Either it is an open house of 

 such proportions, and with roosts so placed, that, theoretically, the 

 fowls, when roosting, are kept warm, because they are so far from 

 the open front and the rate of movement of air in the house is so 

 slow that a considerable part of the heat they diffuse benefits them ; 

 or it is a cold house, in which the heat thrown off by the birds can 

 have no appreciable effect on the temperature about them. In 

 houses of the first class the air entering the front is supposed to 

 make no draft to which the fowls on the roosts would be exposed ; 

 in houses of the second class drafts are disregarded. Those who 

 advocate and use the warm open-front house have apparently not 

 fully abandoned the idea that the fowls must be kept in a tempera- 

 ture sensibly higher than that outside, and must be protected from 

 direct currents of air entering the house from without. Those who 

 advocate and use cold houses hold that, within a limit (practically 

 the degree of frost that the combs of the male birds will withstand), 

 fowls may be accustomed to low temperatures ; that it is not the 

 absolute degree of cold that injures them or stops egg production, 

 but the variations of temperature ; and that fowls accustomed to 

 the lowest temperatures and free supplies of fresh air are least 

 affected by these. 



No best house. There are not marked regular variations of 

 results in houses differing as to warmth or any other one feature. 

 The fact that results equally good in every way have been ob- 

 tained in many different types of houses under a great variety of 



