56 PRESENT STATUS OF POULTRY INVESTIGATION 



^>f a flock of forty-five hundred. If, at the time this epidemic broke out, 

 "one single section of the poultry plant could have been effectively isloated 

 from all the rest, the loss would probably have been less than five hundred, 

 *or at most, a thousand birds. Such methods could have been devised and 

 fcwt into effect for fifty dollars. The poultry man has now lost five thousand 

 fowls and also his trade. It is the part of Poultry Hygiene to study into all 

 these matters which make for the well being of poultry, both to maintain 

 their own vitality and by all possible means to guard it against the inva- 

 sion of hostile microorganisms. There is excellent opportunity, and emi- 

 nent need, for station investigators to enter into this field of work. 



This brings us at once to a consideration of the distribution and nature 

 of the work on poultry diseases among the experiment stations. It is a 

 regrettable fact that of the forty -eight experiment stations in the United 

 States, only six are, at the present time engaged in the study of poultry 

 diseases, or disease parasites; and only four of these are making a definite 

 study of the infectious or communicable diseases. Efforts in this country 

 to establish etiological relations of poultry diseases, have not, as a rule, 

 yielded fruitful results, either in benefit to the poultry industry as a whole, 

 or to pure science. Indeed, it is only within a comparatively short time 

 that the pathological anatomy and etiology of poultry diseases, as a whole, 

 has begun to be placed upon a scientifically accurate basis. Ever since the 

 painstaking and productive researches of Pasteur upon fowl cholera, 

 scientifically trained investigators in this country have avoided, to a greater 

 or less extent, the field of poultry diseases, either believing that the field was 

 too far removed from the study of mammalian diseases to make their 

 investigation really of value, or convinced that the subject of poultry 

 diseases was too limited in its scope, and too narrow in its suggestiveness, to 

 furnish the researcher with problems worthy of his steel. And for these 

 reasons the work in the investigation of poultry diseases in this country has 

 until within the last five years, been practically at a standstill compared 

 with the progress made along similar lines in Germany, France, and Russia. 

 As a result, our text books are full of data on diseases which do not exist, 

 and when we wish to obtain definite information on some of those that do 

 exist in this country, we are forced to go to the works of German, French, or 

 Italian investigators. 



The nature of the replies from the various experiment stations, together 

 with the loose, and often unreliable, quality of the majority of the few 

 bulletins that have been published by the stations upon the subject of 

 poultry diseases, are decidedly suggestive of the strenuous effort that 

 should be made to raise the standard of this line of investigation in the 

 institutions of this country. 



