THE CALL OF THE HEN. 25 



CHAPTER II. 



PRELIMINARY REMARKS, GIVING SOME ADVICE jo THE 

 READER. 



The writer is not one of the long-winded kind. I don't 

 like to talk a long time in order to say a few words, or write 

 a dozen pages where one will do as well. I believe in handing 

 out the chunks of gold with as little dross as possible. I 

 think the reader would rather receive the information I have 

 to offer in one page than in a dozen; that he would rather 

 discover the facts in a few feet than to be obliged to hunt 

 over a hundred acres of literary space for the same informa- 

 tion. For that reason I will make this work as brief as possible. 

 I will be aided in my effort to do so by the fact that the theories 

 offered in this work have been more or less demonstrated 

 by the Government Experimental Stations of New Zealand 

 and the States of Minnesota and California; also in the 

 poultry plants of the five State hospitals (which contain 

 thousands of hens) in the State of California, under the 

 auspices of the State Board of Health and the physicians 

 of the different hospitals. It might not be a difficult matter 

 to mislead a few poultrymen on a subject that deals wholly 

 with physiology and anatomy, but it would be absurd to think 

 for a moment that one could deceive all the physicians in 

 five State insane hospitals. It seems a man who would still 

 doubt would believe the world is flat, especially when he 

 learns that a member of the State Board of Health told the 

 writer that there was a difference of $1,500 in favor of using 

 this system, in one year, in one of the hospitals alone. 



We commence in this chapter the unfolding of a method 

 or test by which the reader can tell approximately the value 

 of a hen and a male bird as a breeding proposition (and in 

 the chapter on Breeding alone this book will be worth its 

 weight in gold to the fanciers), an egg-producer or a meat- 

 producer. It is my desire to make the facts contained in 

 this book so clear and the tests so easy of application that 

 anyone can become proficient in the use of them in a short 

 time. Therefore I have prepared a series of illustrations 

 showing numerous types and conditions of fowls, also various 



