16 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [P. D. 4. 



should be. Out of 100 males that a man produces he can 

 eliminate and sell all but about two or three, or four or five; 

 in other words, he has got 95 per cent, more selecting power to 

 get good ones and only good ones, whereas with the hens he 

 cannot reduce them to that extent. He has to keep about 15 

 to 20 hens for every one male that he has selected; therefore 

 he can be more particular about the quality of his males than 

 of his females. I do not know anything that is more inspiring, 

 I do not know anything that is more w^orth while, or anything 

 that will tie a man to his business better than to get right into 

 the flock and study those chickens and reduce them by a proc- 

 ess of elimination each day or each week as the time comes to 

 sell, throwing out the undesirables until, in the fall of the year, 

 he has a choice bunch of cockerels that money could not buy. 

 And I want to say right here that if a person has not got the 

 love for the business and the love for the stock that will lead 

 him to go In there and help to pick out those birds to fit that 

 ideal that he has established, he never can hope to succeed in 

 the poultry business. 



The next step in the selection for breeding is to get uniformity 

 as nearly as possible in the stock that we rear, as regards eggs. 

 We have been making quite a good many studies of the effect 

 of time of hatching on the ultimate producing power of the 

 birds, and you would be surprised to see how such an appar- 

 ently unimportant matter as a few weeks in the time of the 

 year when the chickens are hatched will affect their ultimate 

 productive value. In other words, it is not simply a question 

 of knowing from which hen or which male our chickens come; 

 it is also a question of knowing when we use those eggs for 

 hatching, — whether it is in March or in April or in May or in 

 June, or earlier or later. And would you believe that, taking 

 the same hens absolutely and hatching their eggs from Febru- 

 ary on through to July, you get an entirely different result in 

 the laying of those birds for the first year, and frequently also 

 in the next years, due not to the hens or the males, but just 

 to the time you hatched them. A man has no right, therefore, 

 to expect to get the best results until he has learned for him- 

 self, with his own breed and in his own section of the country, 

 as to when he should hatch, and that will depend upon the 



