20 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



examining the hens I told him I would not take them as a 

 gift if I had to keep them one year. "Why," he asked. "Be- 

 cause," I relied, "after keeping them a year and selling them, 

 the price I would receive 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 poultry man 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 scien- 

 tific 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 peoples' opinions. 



By studyng 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 

 lor 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 wiish 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 pro- 

 ducers, 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 genera- 

 tions, and their progeny will degenerate. The chickens from 

 the hens and cockerells 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 some times degenerate just as the egg type, until they 

 are practically worthless as profitable meat producers. The 

 chicks from the fancy mating may be a failure from the fan- 

 cier's point of view. This is the rock that some old poul- 

 try breeders are sometimes wrecked upon. One case of na- 

 tional interest was the case of the late lamented Prof. Gowell. 

 of the State of Maine Experiment Station. He had started 

 some years before to breed up a heavy laying strain by using 



