No. 4.] EGG PRODUCTION. 89 



these low producers that had laid an average of 28 and none 

 more than 82, we find that all except two or three were new, 

 had on their new feathers, or approximately so, and the 

 others, the advanced ones, were just getting ready to have 

 new feathers come in. So that you can see clearly there the 

 fact that the high-producing hen is one that almost never 

 fails to molt late, and it is almost the exception when the 

 low-producing hen continues to molt late. 



Here is a picture (Fig. 3) of Lady Cornell taken the sixth 

 day of December, after laying 257 eggs in a year. She 

 .needs a blanket. II ow many persons would have failed to 

 kill that hen in a flock of hens where all of the others molted 

 early ? You would say that she hasn't got the strength to 

 produce feathers. But rags sometimes cover up pretty good 

 quality in the hen race, if not in the human race. 



Here is an object lesson (Fig. 18). The hen that we will 

 now discuss had at least ly^ pounds of surplus fat on her 

 body. You see what a body that is; the fat shows abnor- 

 mally. We "killed her to save her life." She was worth 

 about $1.25 to sell to somebody to eat. She had a nice red 

 comb, her feathers looked bright and she seemed in good 

 health, but she was so fat that her abdomen pretty nearly 

 dragged on the ground, and I was afraid she would die 

 of fatty degeneration. She was a jDerfectly normal and 

 healthy hen, but simply over-fat. We found in her a " ready- 

 to-lay " hard-shelled egg, which she would have laid the next 

 hour if we hadn't killed her. I told my wife about it and 

 she said: ''That is not very remarkable, I could have told 

 you that before." Well, that is the way the women folks 

 have of doing. They are familiar with the condition of hens 

 in regard to fatness and production, for they prepare the hens 

 before they cook them for our dinners. She said it was very 

 common to find a very fat hen laying. We began investi- 

 gating the question, and we have examined over 100 hens, 

 and have photographed many of them to see whether there is 

 any co-relation between the fatness of a hen and her laying 

 condition. We never find a hen laying that is poor ; we find 

 that a hen lays best when she has surplus fat and frequently 

 large quantities of it. We find more mistakes are made in 



