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devised. Thick walls, double or trij^le, with air spaces or linings 

 between, will not frost inside in cold weather as the single walls do. 

 Some poultrymen make a loft of the space under the roof above the 

 plates, and fill or partly till it with hay or straw, which will absorb the 

 moisture and keep the room dry. 



Such devices, however, do not solve the problem of fresh air. It is 

 practically impossible to keep a poultry house shut up so that the heat 

 from the hens will keep it warm, and at the same time have the air in it 

 renewed as it should be. If the building is large in proportion to the 

 number of fowls kept in it, the heat from them has no appreciable effect 

 on the temperature of it. If it is small enough to be kept warm by as 

 many fowls as its floor space will accommodate, the air in it soon be- 

 comes vitiated. As I had occasion to look at the subjects of warmth and 

 ventilation in the light of the experience of many different people, I 

 began to think perhaps the prevailing ideas on those matters were not 

 correct, and to ask myself whether it were not possible to get better con- 

 ditions and satisfactory results in houses of a different kind. 



To this question I found an answer that satisfied me in the large num- 

 ber of instances I could collect from memory, where as good results had 

 been obtained in cold, poorly built houses as the average results in warm 

 houses, and in the few instances where exceptionally good results had 

 been obtained under conditions that we had been accustomed to regard 

 as very bad. Such occurrences had, of course, been considered in the 

 forming of the general authoritative opinion as to the requirements of 

 winter poultry keeping, but were usually considered as exceptions that 

 proved the rule, — a very convenient way of getting around facts that 

 do not accord with theories. 



But, however convincing the evidence a man may gather in this way 

 may be to himself, it has not much weight with others ; so, instead of 

 publishing the results of my thoughts, I went to work, built a house that 

 in several important features was quite contrary to prevailing ideas of 

 what a poultry house should be, and used it for nearly a year before 

 > saying anything publicly about it. 



This house was a mere shell or shed ; the walls were of common hem- 

 lock boards, laid perpendicularly on a light frame, and the joints between 

 the boards covered on the back and ends of the house with common bat- 

 tens ; the joints on the front were left open. The roof was of shingles, 

 laid on strips of furring placed three inches apart. 



The house was not tight anywhere. As I used it the first winter, — it 

 having been built in a hurry late in the fall, — the battens were merely 

 held in place with two or three small nails in each, and were loose 

 enough to let a great deal of air in around them. The cracks in the 

 boards, some quite large, were not covered at all. The front of the 

 house had double doors six feet wide in each section, and these were 

 ke2)t open all day unless a storm would beat in, and all night except 

 on very coldest nights or nights when storms would drive into the doors. 



The house was built on wet ground, — that is, ground that was thor- 

 oughly soaked by the late rains. After the roof was on, the ground in 

 the house was spaded up ; and when the house, a few days later, was 



