218 



AUSTRALIAN AQBICULTURB. 



Poultry Fountain. 



Clean Water. This is the precaution against disease. 

 The water fountain shown in illustration has a colonial look 

 about it. It is made from a four-gallon kerosene tin. A 

 hole is cut as at (A), and a piece of tin, bent half-circle 

 fashion, (B), is soldered to the bottom of the tin, so as to 



surround the hole. We 

 then have a true water seal, 

 and a continuous supply of 

 say half an inch of water, 

 as loug as the contents of 

 the four gallon tin hold out. 

 The requirements are that 

 the tin be perfectly air-tight. 

 The outlet hole may be 

 about half an inch high, by one inch or two inches wide. 

 An efficient "fountain" on the same principle can be made 

 with preserved meat, jam, and other tins. When set upon a 

 raised board or I ox, in a shady place, a supply of cool, clean 

 water is ensured to the yard. 



Feeding. This is a leading consideration. Fowls 

 must be fed often and every day, early and late. They 

 require careful feeding ; but a tempts to provide special 

 food leads to no end of tribulation, and little else. They 

 will eat any good food when healthy, and are scarcely 

 worth troubling with when unhealthy. Wheat, oats, 

 barley, pollard, and bran are all good. Maize, whole or 

 cracked, is too fattening, if given without other grain, 

 bread, rice, meat, anything and everything that man uses, 

 is readily eaten by fowls ; but while the former can 

 educate himself into using all sorts of messes and 

 mixtures, into suffering from dyspepsia, indigestion, 

 gout, medicine swallowing, and many other forms 

 of stomach ruination, fowls suffer from all such 

 attempts at " civilising " them, and wherever any- 

 thing of the kind is persevered in, they become 

 discontented, diseased, and die. A reliable system 

 of feeding is to give soft crumbly food in the morning, 

 which in winter should be blood warm ; and grain with 

 meat, broken bone, oyster shells, a^d other bone, flesh, 

 fat, and egg-forming materials at other times. Laying 



