96 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



delicate touch, the comparative value of chicks for prepotency can be 

 judged as well when they are three days old as at any time later. Then 

 again, we are obliged to keep our chicks until we can distinguish the 

 males from the females, and as a rule we will lose nothing if we keep 

 them until they are at least ten weeks old, when, if they have had the 

 right care and feed, they will be old enough to test. If their pelvic 

 bones are thick at this age, it indicates they are more or less of the meat 

 type; if their pelvic bones are crooked, it indicates that they never will 

 be straight; and if they lack prepotency, it indicates that they will always 

 lack it, for they come out of the shell whh this organ relatively large or 

 small, just as a baby is born with a nose on its face. 



I want to impress on the reader the importance of using the utmost 

 care in measuring the head for prepotency, as it is very easy for a person 

 to think he has measured the head right when he has not done so; 

 especially if he has large self-esteem, he then thinks everything he does 

 must be right; it would be impossible for him to do anything otherwise 

 than the right way. In my classes I have found workers in the ma- 

 chinists' trade made the most correct measurements, especially if they 

 had the faculty of human nature large, while I have found that profes- 

 sional men who had human nature small make the poorest measure- 

 ments; this was owing to prejudice, and not to the absence of the com- 

 bination of the necessary mental faculties. I suppose there will always 

 be found those who will discredit the most obvious fact, if it puts them 

 at a disadvantage from a mental, moral, or financial point of view; 

 but in this case it would be cutting off your nose to spite your face to 

 be careless in any of these tests. 



I have never yet, in my investigations of hundreds of poultry plants, 

 found a degenerate lot of poultry but that they were small in prepotency. 

 But to return to the cockerels: As we said on page 83, we raised 300 

 cockerels the first year I was in California. After testing them at three 

 months old, as described, I found eighteen that I considered worth 

 keeping to the age of nine months, when I would give them the final 

 test. When they were eight months old I tested them again, and while 

 I found that they all had good depth of abdomen and good prepotency, 

 six of them had crooked pelvic bones. The pelvic bones on twelve of 

 the cockerels had continued to grow straight, while the pelvic bones 

 on six of them had grown crooked and were coming together at the points 

 like the horns on a Jersey cow. I had to discard these six breeders and 

 send them to market. 



The reader will see that, out of 300 cockerels, I had only 12 that 

 were capable of improving my flock. Last year (1912), out of about 

 l,200 y I had only 200 that I considered good enough to keep for breeders; 

 and while all my birds have been more or less squirrel-tailed, one of last 

 year's 200 is a very well-formed, low- tailed bird, but he lacks the pure- 

 white ear-lobes. He scores 250-egg type, and I have refused $50.00 

 for him. I am going to see if I can breed a low-tailed type of Leghorn 

 in quantities that will conform to the present American Standard, and 

 average about 200 eggs per year in large flocks. The reader will under- 

 stand that the parents of these cockerels were selected with the greatest 

 care as to capacity, type, and prepotency. Type and prepotency are 

 more or less hereditary traits or features, distinguishable in the sub- 

 jects, if we have the knowledge necessary to discern them. But the 

 individual inherent or innate potentiality of any one or each bird cannot 



