THE CALL OF THE HEN. 109 



it puts them at a disadvantage from a mental, moral, or 

 financial point of view; but in this case it would be cutting 

 off your nose to spite your face to be careless in any of these 

 tests. 



I have never yet, in my investigations of hundreds of 

 poultry plants, found a degenerate lot of poultry but that 

 they were small in prepotency. But to return to the cocker- 

 els: As we said on page 107, we raised 300 cockerels the 

 first year I was in California. After testing them at three 

 months old, as described, I found eighteen that I considered 

 worth keeping to the age of nine months, when I would give 

 them the final test. When they were eight months old I 

 tested them again, and while I found that they all had good 

 depth of abdomen and good prepotency, six of them had crook- 

 ed pelvic bones. The pelvic bones on twelve of the cockerels 

 had continued to grow straight, while the pelvic bones on six 

 of them had grown crooked and were coming together at the 

 points, like the horns on a Jersey cow. I had to discard 

 these six breeders and send them to market. 



The reader will see that, out of 300 cockerels, I had 

 only 12 that were capable of improving my flock. Last 

 year (1912), out of about 1,200, I had only 200 that I consider- 

 ed good enough to keep for breeders; and while all my birds 

 have been more or less squirrel-tailed, one of last year's 

 200 is a very well-formed, low-tailed bird, but he lacks the 

 pure-white ear-lobes. He scores 250-egg type, and I have 

 refused $50.00 for him. I am going to see if I can breed a 

 low-tailed type of Leghorn in quantities that will conform 

 to the present American Standard, and average about 200 

 eggs per year in large flocks. The reader will understand 

 that the parents of these cockerels were selected with the 

 greatest care as to capacity, type, and prepotency. Type 

 and prepotency are more or less hereditary traits or features, 

 distinguishable in the subjects, if we have the knowledge 

 necessary to discern them. But the individual inherent or 

 innate potentiality of any one or each bird cannot be increased 

 or diminished by the breeder; that is to say, feed and environ- 

 ment will not materially change the impotent bird into a 

 potent bird, neither will it change the typical meat-type into 

 the egg-type bird. 



