CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. 

 THE BIRDS. 



1. When the Chicken Leaves the Egg. When a young 

 chicken, or other bird, comes out of the egg, we are 

 disposed to take him as he is and ask no questions about 

 his past. At this time the young bird is enough like its 

 parents for us to recognize it as a bird. To be sure, it 

 makes some changes after it hatches, but it has all the 

 organs of the adult, and it lives in the same general way 

 that it does when it grows up. It is not very hard to 

 imagine that a young chick plus proper food should in due 

 time become a laying hen or a fighting cock. After 

 hatching it passes through no such changes as we saw in 

 the passage of the tadpole into the frog. 



But the events back of this appearance of the bird from 

 the tgg make a most remarkable chapter in its history. 

 Indeed many of the things that happen within the shell 

 are not unlike the passage of the tadpole into the frog. 



2. The Character of the Egg. The egg of the bird has 

 a limy shell about it, and inside that is a tough membrane. 

 Just within this membrane is the sticky "white" of the egg. 

 Not one of these things is a part of the real egg. All of 

 them were added after the egg was formed. The real egg 

 is the part we call the yellow, or yolk. 



Most of us have seen in the body of an old hen, behig 

 prepared for the table, the ovary with a number of yolks 

 of different sizes, like little potatoes around a potato 

 plant. These are of different ages, and one or two may be 



93 



