POULTRY CULTURE 



he must make the best possible use of the relatively small pro- 

 portion of each year's produce in which he finds combined a high 

 degree of excellence in many characters. 



Collective selection and compensation in breeding. Progressive 

 selection can apply in practice to only a few of the more important 

 characters. It is in effect selection for the elimination of faults 

 which the breeder regards as intolerable. When birds with such 

 faults have been eliminated, what remain will always show consider- 

 able variation, and this will be most marked in superficial char- 

 acters. Continued careful breeding reduces differences, but since at 

 the same time it develops the breeder's critical faculty and his 

 ability to distinguish slight differences, the proportion of what he 

 considers good breeders in his stock may not be materially changed. 

 There is usually a tendency, partly in the stock and partly in the 

 breeder's selection, to develop a stock in the direction of its 

 strongest points. The most effective checks on this are the written 

 standard, competition, and the difficulty of selling specimens which 

 are decidedly weak in any superficial character. 



Having eliminated the most unlike individuals by progressive 

 selection, the breeder proceeds to make appropriate matings of 

 those he has reserved by collective consideration not simply of the 

 points of the individual but of the points of a pair, male and female. 

 His object is to secure in the sexes, as far as possible, likeness 

 to the type to be produced (sexual differences of color, etc. duly 

 considered), and when the bird of one sex varies from the typical in 

 any character, to secure in the other sex the opposite variation in 

 that character, nearly all variations in well-bred birds being slight 

 when compared with variations in specimens from parents markedly 

 unlike. This balancing of opposite tendencies in variation is of 

 little use, as a rule, when the characters considered represent wide 

 variations, for the result of the union of such characters is likely to 

 give many intermediate grades of blending of characters and only 

 a very few of any desired grade. The mating of individuals differ- 

 ing widely in any character is good practice only when the desired 

 character cannot be secured by breeding together like individuals. 

 The object of the compensation method in mating is not to enable 

 the breeder to use for breeding purposes as large a proportion of 

 his stock as possible, but to enable him to equalize the tendencies 



