No. 4.] EGG PRODUCTION. 83 



parallelogram-shaped body, fine head, good, big comb, fine, 

 bright, round eye, and good, heavy shanks, set wide apart. 

 In the next slide (Fig. 9) you will see their sisters, hatched 

 in the same incubator, brooded in the same brooder and fed 

 alike. They are simply separated because of difference in 

 vitality. Do you notice the difference in type ? Those low- 

 vitality birds (Fig. 9) are a little hollow-breasted, and if 

 you could see them faced the other way they would be nar- 

 rower between the shanks ; they would also be more slender 

 in the shanks, more delicate in make-up, not quite so large, 

 or with a comb not so large or perhaps of so high a color. 



On this slide (Fig. 10) you will see their chickens. The 

 eggs were selected from those two groups of hens just shown, 

 incubated in the same incubator, brooded in the same 

 brooder, ran together all summer long in the same corn 

 field, only distinguishable by the number on their leg bands, 

 and in the fall they were brought up together and separated 

 and photographed. These above are the pullets hatched 

 from the high-vitality hens and these below are from those 

 of low vitality. Those above weighed half a pound apiece 

 more than those of low vitality ; they also began to lay sev- 

 eral weeks earlier, and they laid more than a dozen eggs 

 apiece per year more than those of low vitality, and they 

 paid us a profit of between 40 and 50 cents apiece more per 

 hen. There was a difference of 1 pound apiece in the same 

 experiment, where Plymouth Rocks were used instead of 

 Leghorns, the Plymouth Rock being a bigger bird. Just 

 think of the distinction in quality you get when it comes 

 to selecting birds ! 



We don't have to begin with the chicken. We can begin 

 with the egg. We can tell a chicken of high vitality before 

 it is hatched. We simply examined the eggs in one incu- 

 bator at the end of seven days, and divided them according 

 to the way the heart lhrol)l)ed and the size of the blood-ves- 

 sels. We picked out one group from the other, and at the 

 end of the hatch we fixed it so that the chickens had to fall 

 into separate trays so that they could not get mixed up, and 

 this picture (Fig. 11) shows the result. These eggs were 

 left from those selected from high-vitality chickens and these 



