THE CALL OF THE HEN. 97 



I have never yet in my investigations of hundreds of poul- 

 try plants found a degenerate lot of poultry, but that they were 

 small in prepotency. But to return to the cockerels, as we said 

 on page 95 we raised 300 cockerels the first year I was in 

 California. After testing them at three months old as de- 

 scribed, I found 18 that I considered worth keeping to the age 

 of 9 months, when I would give them the final test. When 

 they were 8 months old I tested them again, and while I found 

 that they all had good depth of abdomen and good prepotency,, 

 that six of them had crooked 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 as 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 1200 I had only 200 that I considered good enough 

 to keep for breeders, and while all my birds have been more or 

 less squirel 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 fifty dollars 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 Stand- 

 ard 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 prepot- 

 ency. . 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 in- 

 herent or innate potentiality of any one or of each bird cannot 

 be increased or diminished by the breeder. That is to say,, 

 feed and environment will not materially change the impotent 

 bird into a potent bird, neither will it change the typical meat 

 type into the egg type bird. 



But (I hear some sarcastic reader say) we certainly can- 

 diminish or increase their prepotency by alternately starving* 

 and feeding them well. That is begging the question. You 

 could affect their fecundity very readily, but what the writer 

 wishes to impress on the reader is that while type and prepot- 

 ency are fixed before birth, and also the ability to govern 



