MAINE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 21 



as a sex-linked character. The male bird which possesses this 

 hereditary factor for high production may however transmit 

 it both to his sons and his daughters. It thus appears that the 

 high egg productiveness exhibited by some pullets or hens is 

 always directly inherited from the sire, and not at all directly 

 from the dam, though the sire himself may very likely have 

 inherited the quality from his dam. Indeed the male which is 

 hereditarily pure (homozygous) with respect to this high pro- 

 ducing factor must receive one half of his endowment from 

 his dam. The practical sigjiificance of this matter is that more 

 attention will have to be paid to the male birds in breeding for 

 egg-production than has hitherto been the case. Only males 

 from high-laying dams should be used as breeders and of those 

 only a portion will transmit high producing qualities to any 

 large proportion of the daughters. An important practical 

 step is to toe-mark, or otherwise identify, all pullets so that 

 their sire may be known. From their performance the breeder 

 will be able to judge of the ability of the sons of this sire (the 

 brothers of the pullets) to transmit high-producing qualities.* 



Raising Chickens by Natural Processes. 



While even the small grower of chickens in many cases uses 

 an incubator for hatching, circumstances make it necessary at 

 times to hatch and raise chickens by aid of the mother hen. 

 To persons so situated an outline of the method practiced at the 

 Station before incubators had reached their present develop- 

 ment may be helpful. An unused tie-up in a barn was taken 

 for the incubating room and a platform was made along the 

 inner side. The platform was 3 feet above the floor and was 

 2 1-2 feet wide and 50 feet long. It was divided into fifty 

 little stalls or nests, each i foot wide, 2 feet long, and i foot 

 high. This left a 6-inch walk along the front of the nests for 

 the hens to light on when flying up from the floor. Each nest 

 had a door made of laths at the front, so as to give ventilation. 

 The door was hinged at the bottom and turned outward. 

 Across the center of each nest a low partition was placed, so 

 that the nesting material would be kept in the back end — the 



*A detailed report of the experiments on the basis of which the above 

 statements are made is published as Bulletin 205 of the Maine Agricul- 

 tural Experiment Station. 



