NATURAL LAWS. 5 



Feeding- is the most important point. I have fed all 

 kinds of Poultry and have tried several hundred different 

 ways of feeding 1 . I have camped out in the west and the 

 wild west. I have watched nature, such as wild and domes- 

 tic fowls and animals. Seven years of out door life under 

 canvas tents, day and nigiit, summer and winter, and half 

 of the night was spent experimenting. Watching- birds and 

 animals during- the day time, close watch kept, how they 

 feed and what they eat. My experience tells me that a hen 

 will do 100 per cent better if she is left alone to pick her own 

 feed and select her own roost and have a free rang-e on the 

 farm where grain and cattle are raised. Often she comes 

 home with twelve to eig-hteen chicks six to eig-ht weeks old. 

 Who fed those chickens, who watered them, who drove 

 them to shelter in the rainstorms, etc? One season I had 

 over two dozen such hens and turkeys come home who stole 

 their nests, and hatched every eg-g and raised every chick 

 and poult. Why did not these get diseases? Why did they 

 not get chilled, etc., and die? Nature is the best doctor. 

 Follow her closely. 



Why do oui Poultry have hundreds of diseases now, 

 and twenty to forty years ago, our fathers tell us, they 

 never had diseases. Of course they did not raise 10,000 

 chickens, as we do now, but they raised from 200 to 2,000 

 every year. I was born and raised on a New Jersey Poultry 

 and fruit farm thirty-three years ago. When I was five 

 years old I owned my first bantams. When twelve years 

 old I had over 200 fowls of all kinds. I never had diseases 

 among my poultry until I read up on Poultry. When I was 

 ^fifteen or sixteen years old I commenced to read up on the 

 subject. I got all the books and papers I could, made my 

 own brooders and incubators and in one year I was swamp- 

 ed with trouble of all kinds, roup, cholera and other dis- 

 eases. They would die like sheep, wagon loads of them 

 very year. I lost money so fast that it got me to thinking; 

 why is it that I have diseases how and did not have when I 

 did not know a Leghorn from a Dominick. I always hatch- 

 ed chicks and turkeys by hens and raised them by heias and 



