76 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



thinks, of the fundamental principle that underlies the re- 

 production of the species. After a number of matings that 

 were more or less discouraging failures, I decided to look to 

 the brain of the bird as the seat of the cause of a great many 

 of the variations between the characteristics of the offspring 

 and those of the parents. I had previously demonstrated 

 by experiment that environment had an influence on the shap- 

 ing of the skull of the birds. By focusing on this subject 

 the skull-knowledge I had gained in the previous nine years, 

 I was led to think that brain governed most of the functions 

 of the body, and if so, why not.the reproductive function? 

 I reasoned that as I had mated up several pens of the same 

 type of hens with the same type of male birds, and that as 

 there was no difference in their temperaments, that the hens 

 all looked alike, all weighed alike, and were all in the same 

 condition or, in other words, they were all in perfect condi- 

 tion (to be more explicit, the hens were three fingers abdomen, 

 pelvic bone l /i& of an inch thick; all hens were in good con- 

 dition; the cock birds were two-finger abdomens, in normal 

 condition, and pelvic bones Vie of an inch think; all hens 

 were alike and all cock birds were alike, and all were about 

 a year old) ; that there must be something apart from the 

 anatomy and physiology of the hen that governed or in some 

 measure controlled the reproductive functions. As I had 

 exhausted all my resources in the above lines, I was very 

 reluctantly obliged to enter a new field of research the field 

 of Phrenology. I killed the cock birds that had given us 

 the best results, boiled their skulls until free of flesh, and 

 found them as in No. 1, Fig. 35. The skulls of the cock 

 birds that give the next best results were like No. 2, Fig. 

 35, and the skulls of the cock birds that gave the poorest 

 results were like No. 4, Fig. 35. 



The arrows A, B, C, and D show the base of the brain. 

 If A were continued upward, it would pass through the pro- 

 jection */4 of an inch from the end; if B were continued, it 

 would pass through the projection about l /% of an inch from 

 the end; while C would be at the extreme end of the pro- 

 jection, and D would pass outside the skull. The part of 

 the skull where the arrows 1, 2, 3, 4 point contains the rear 

 lobe of the brain, and examination will show that the develop- 



