26 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



egg type, the progeny would show an increase over their parents in 

 stamina and egg-production. I would also have shown him where the 

 birds he was breeding from were deficient in the faculty that governs 

 fecundity, or, in other words, which controls the function of reproduc- 

 tion. 



Whittier, in "Maud Muller," says, "For of all sad words of tongue 

 or pen, the^ saddest are these: il might have been." Yes, "it might 

 have been." Professor Gowell might have lived to give many more 

 years of aid to the poultry world and his tragic death been prevented; 

 but he wrote the Doctor that he did not want me to come. He seemed 

 determined to solve the problem himself, and no doubt would have done 

 so if he had been as care-free from routine duties as a man in his position 

 should have been; and I charge his untimely end to society. The men 

 and women in our public institutions who are giving their lives for the 

 benefit of humanity are not appreciated at their true value. We de- 

 mand the full limit of routine duties, forgetting that it is impossible for 

 a tired body to furnish sufficient nutriment to the brain to solve these 

 intricate problems that are continually confronting them, and while 

 we cause them to suffer mentally and physically individually, we cause 

 ourselves to suffer collectively, by our parsimonious treatment of them. 



CHAPTER II. 



PRELIMINARY REMARKS, GIVING SOME ADVICE TO THE 

 READER. 



The writer is not one of the long-winded kind. I don't like to talk 

 a long time in order to say a few words, or write a dozen pages where 

 one will do as well. I believe in handing out the chunks of gold with 

 as little dross as possible. I think the reader would rather receive 

 the information I have to offer in one page than in a dozen; that he would 

 rather discover the facts in a few feet than to be obliged to hunt over 

 a hundred acres of literary space for the same information. For that 

 reason I will make this work as brief as possible. I will be aided in my 

 effort to do so by the fact that the theories offered in this work have 

 been more or less demonstrated by the Government Experimental 

 Stations of New Zealand and the States of Minnesota and California; 

 also in the poultry plants of the five State hospitals (which contain 

 thousands of hens) in the State of California, under the auspices of the 

 State Board of Health and the physicians of the different hospitals. 

 It might not be a difficult matter to mislead a few poultry men on a 

 subject that deals wholly with physiology and anatomy, but it would 

 be absurd to think for a moment that one could deceive all the phy- 

 sicians in five State insane hospitals. It seems a man who would still 

 doubt would believe the world is flat, especially when he learns that a 

 member of the State Board of Health told the writer that there was a 

 difference of $1,500 in favor of using this system in one year, in one 

 of the hospitals alone. 



We commence in this chapter the unfolding of a method or test 

 by which the reader can tell approximately the value of a hen and a 

 male bird as a breeding proposition (and in the chapter on Breeding 

 alone this book will be worth its weight in gold to the fanciers) 



