22 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



ceive for the hens and the eggs they would lay would not 

 pay for their feed. I cannot see why you keep them." The 

 next evening he said to me, "Do you see that man moving 

 into the place over yonder? Well, I have sold those Leghorn 

 hens to that newcomer for $500." "Is this an exceptional 

 case?" you ask. I have only this to say: that all the David 

 Harums are not in the horse business, neither can I see why 

 a poultryman should be his brother's keeper, when it is not 

 the rule in other lines of business. It seems to me the 

 better way is to study poultry from a scientific point of view, 

 so that you can judge the value of a hen for the purpose you 

 want her for, and not have to depend on other people's 

 opinions. 



By studying this book carefully you will be able to tell 

 approximately the number of eggs a hen is capable of laying 

 in a year; you can also select the hens that will be the best 

 for breeding purposes, for eggs, for meat, or as a dual-purpose 

 hen that is, a hen that will give you the largest number of 

 eggs possible with the largest possible amount of meat when 

 you wish to sell her, or the hen that will produce the best 

 broilers, regardless of any one particular breed. Some hens 

 will be very good layers, some very good meat-producers, some 

 very good dual-purpose type, and some very fine fancy birds, 

 and you can mate them with the same type of male bird and 

 breed from these birds for a few generations, and their progeny 

 will degenerate. The chickens from the hens and cockerels or 

 cock birds of the 200-egg type may lay less each generation, 

 until in eight or ten generations they may not lay enough to 

 pay for their feed. The progeny from some of the best meat 

 and dual-purpose type matings will sometimes degenerate just 

 as the egg type, until they are practically worthless as profit- 

 able meat-producers. The chicks from the fancy mating may 

 be a failure from the fancier's point of view. 



This is the rock that some old poultry-breeders are 

 sometimes wrecked upon. One case of national interest was 

 the case of the late lamented Professor Gowell, of the State 

 of Maine Experiment Station. He had started some years 

 before to breed up a heavy-laying strain by using the trap- 

 nest, selecting eggs for hatching from hens that were his 

 best layers and conformed as near as possible to the standard, 

 and using cockerels hatched from these eggs to mate 



