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individuals on your place. It is just as "true as preaching" that you 

 cannot afford to let a weak chicken stay on the farm. They must go 

 for the sake of your own reputation, and it is also good business from 

 the breeding standpoint. In the fall of the year when the chickens 

 are brought up to go into winter quarters they are selected again. 

 Keeping only a few of the finest cockerels, perhaps two or three 

 times as many as you think you want, culling out and selling all 

 others and also selling all the pullets any time they show a tendency 

 to weakness or slow development, and make it a principle to go into 

 winter quarters with every one a good one. Get big, healthy, hardy, 

 strapping, early-hatched pullets, and they are the ones that will lay 

 the eggs when they bring high prices. 



I will give you briefly the experiments we have tried at Cornell 

 the past three years. In the fall of the year, when going into winter 

 quarters, we selected a lot of Leghorns and Barred Rocks and divided 

 them into groups of twenty-five each and put into three pens seventy- 

 five of the strongest pullets we had; in the other pens we put seventy- 

 five individuals which showed some evidence of physical weakness. 

 There was not a sick chicken in the bunch. We fed these chickens 

 alike. The same person did the work. They were in similar houses 

 and similar varieties were compared. All had been hatched and reared 

 together. We fed and handled them for the year. This is the result : 

 The pullets selected for high vitality, taking the average of the three 

 flocks, laid about one dozen eggs apiece more than the pullets se- 

 lected for their low vitality, and they laid these extra eggs for the 

 most part at a time when eggs were high-priced, and because they ate 

 more economically, making better use of their food, the net difference 

 in money was a profit of 40 cents each per year per hen more for all 

 the three flocks of twenty-five each of high vitality as compared to 

 the three flocks of twenty-five each of low vitality. The high vitality 

 pullets gave us better fertility and hatching power in eggs. The most 

 important result, however, came in the fall of the year when we 

 brought up for winter quarters the pullets and the cockerels that 

 were hatched from the hens of high and low vitality, respectively. 

 Then to our amazement, when we separated them out by their leg 

 band numbers and weighed them and photographed them, we found 

 in the case of the Leghorns that the pullets from high vitality weighed 

 one-half pound each more than others, and in case of Barred Rocks 

 there was a difference of one pound apiece. Is not that strong enough 

 argument that it pays to select our breeding stock with reference to 

 their constitutional vigor? 



That question of constitutional vigor has a good many important 

 bearings on the business. It applied here to our egg production. It 

 also applied in the growing of meat. It applied to the question of 

 saving of loss of mortality. It applied to the more economical and 

 successful hatching of eggs and to the more successful brooding of 

 chickens. All along the line there is an unmistakable saving and a 

 tendency upward instead of a tendency downward, and its rests with 

 you and me whether we are going to start right here and now and 

 breed stronger and stronger individuals or whether we are going to 

 defy nature with the heavy and unnatural feeding, artificial congested 

 methods and other devitalizing conditions lower the vitality of our 

 poultry. 



There are at least ten ways in which we can lose vitality from our 



