No. 4.] EGG PRODUCTION. 85 



of the Leghorn. That means that there is a greater loss in 

 the dressing of the Leghorn than in the dressing of the Rock. 

 But while that is in favor of the Rock as a meat producer 

 and a general-purpose bird, and much to its credit, it doesn't 

 discredit the Leghorn from an egg-producing standpoint, be- 

 cause the Leghorn depends upon its internal machinery to 

 digest food and to lav; it is an egg-laying machine, and it 

 can't be expected to carry a lot of surplus ballast. A Leg- 

 horn is also a flying machine, and you know how flying 

 machines are built. 



Now let us see what happened, or is likely to happen, 

 when you cross-breed White Leghorns and Barred Rocks. 

 We made crosses for four years of Wliite Leghorns and 

 Barred Rocks, to see whether or not it paid better to cross 

 them than to keep them pure-bred. ISTow, remember the 

 combinations. There are four of them : two pure-bred, Leg- 

 horn and Rock, kept pure, and then two crosses, one the 

 Rock on the Leghorn and the Leghorn on the Rock. Let 

 us see what the results were at the end of the year. We 

 found that the' Leghorns laid 121 eggs, the Barred Bock, 

 88; the cross of the Rock on the Leghorn hen, 119, and the 

 cross of the Leghorn on the Rock hen, 111. The distinction 

 was not very great. In the next generation we found that 

 the straight Leghorn laid us 182 eggs, the Barred Rock, 

 129, and the cross-bred Barred Bock on White Leghorn, 

 151, and the cross of the White Leghorn on the Barred Rock, 

 153. So you will see that our highest egg producer was the 

 straight Leghorn, the lowest the straight Rock and the com- 

 bination of the crosses was just about halfway between the 

 production of the Rock and the Leghorn. The Leghorn in- 

 fusion of blood on the Rock increased the production over 

 the straight Rock, but it didn't increase over the pure-bred 

 Leghorn, so we gained nothing in the production and lost 

 the white egg that the New York market wanted and pro- 

 duced eggs that neither New York nor Boston wanted. 



When you come to see how it affected the growth of the 

 chickens, you notice this, that when the chickens were 

 twelve weeks old you could see distinctly the difference in 

 size between the Rock and the Leghorn, and the more they 



