66 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



which will produce as a rule about one hundred to one hun- 

 dred and ten chickens that will be marketable. The overplus 

 will be found to not more than make good the casualties and 

 deformities. 



This plan of hatching and rearing the chickens away from 

 your fowl -houses releases them from and prevents the incuba- 

 tion of millions of lice, which are generally produced by setting 

 the hens where they are in the habit of laying. If you wish 

 to see every louse and red-spider, which is the same as the bed- 

 bug for the human family, concentrated into twenty inches 

 square, just allow a few hens to incubate in the hen-house. 

 The best food for young chickens, for the first week or ten 

 days, is stale wheat bread, soaked in scalded milk, and occa- 

 sionally boiled chopped eggs ; millet and canary-seed will be 

 found quite forcing, and will give the brood a good start, and 

 it pays to use them for the first two weeks. This feed can be 

 followed by scalded oatmeal, wheat-bran, and corn-meal, 

 mixed, say one-third each, with cracked corn and wheat and 

 whole corn, as soon as large enough to eat it. 



It is unadvisable to hatch chickens earlier than the season 

 will admit of getting them on to grass by the time they are 

 four weeks old. If they are hatched earlier than this, sow, 

 when the brood hatches, a frame of oats in your hot-house or 

 kitchen, and cut each day the green oats for them. In this 

 way you can carry the chickens over till the grass comes in 

 the spring, and the trouble thus taken will repay you in the 

 possession of early show birds, that generally sell for a much 

 larger price, according to their merit, then later birds ; and 

 only by such care can we hope to win the premiums in the 

 September exhibitions. Diarrhoea is the scourge of young 

 chickens in early spring. When the symptoms appear give 

 only scalded milk as drink, and none but cooked food, which 

 will be found generally to correct the evil. 



At four to six months old separate the cockerels from the 

 flock, and feed mashed boiled potatoes, with meal and barley 

 and whole corn, thus fitting them for the shambles; and the 

 pullets at five months old place in your breeding-pens, where 

 they will soon commence to repay you for their care, and 

 most assuredly in a like proportion. In nearly all the cases 

 where we find people breeding in this practical way, we find 



