No. 4.] EGG PRODUCTION. 93 



make the ova, — the first part of the egg, which is more than 

 half the fat? Therefore we find that wheu a hen is about 

 to begin to lay, she will begin to eat heavily three or four 

 weeks before she lays, because all that time she is storing up 

 surplus energy — food value — in the ova, ready to lay. 



jSTow, on this slide (Fig. 21), you will sqe that muscle 

 tissue magnified 25 times when put under a microscope, and 

 you can see the ova pretty nearly ready to break through. 

 Here is a fact that ought to startle us: a hen, apparently, 

 may be in the finest of laying condition, laying eggs every 

 day right along, and then something happens that frightens 

 her and interferes with her digestion. A bird cannot eat and 

 digest well when it is frightened or when something is going- 

 wrong. She may not have enough to eat or enough to drink, 

 or there may be an excessive cold snap, or something of that 

 kind, that strikes her and she suffers physically, and that 

 causes a failure of thorough development in the ova. Then 

 what does she do ? She simply draws on that surplus food 

 in the ova to sustain her, and she reabsorbs it, i.e., she uses 

 up eggs that would have been laid, and perhaps worth 50 io 

 75 cents a dozen, if nothing had happened and she had gone 

 on laying. Tn other words, she will take that extra nourish- 

 ment right back and use it for food. Don't you see, then, the 

 importance of having everything righj:, so that when a hen be- 

 gins to lay she can continue, and not use up that nourish- 

 ment to keep warm which she ought to be putting into eggs ? 

 It is a vastly easier thing to stop her laying when she wants ' 

 to lay than it is to start her when she doesn't want to. "We 

 know this ; we don't guess, as is sho^vn by the following: Dr. 

 Eiddell of Chicago University discovered a harmless aniline 

 dye called " Soudan-3," which you can feed to hens in little 

 capsules, one a day or one in two days, and which will color 

 the fat that went into the hen's ova during that day and will 

 not color the fat that was in there the day before or that is 

 deposited the day after. Consequently, the hen that laid this 

 egg, of which this picture (Fig. 22) is a cross section, was 

 fed every other day, and you will see that the yolk was this 

 much bigger, a ring each day. — so that counting up to six 

 rings and multiplying by two, because the color was fed 



