BIOLOGY OF POULTRY KLKPING. IO3 



in the poultry business. He must purchase his stock in one 

 form or another. But somebody must have bred it. There is 

 no way to get stock of high quality except by breeding. Good 

 stock may be very mucl> hurt by bad management, and on the 

 other hand stock which has been run down by improper man- 

 agement may be very much improved by correcting the evils 

 in this direction. But stock which is inherently poor can only 

 be made inherently good by changing its innate constitution. 

 Such a change can only be wrought by careful breeding along 

 definite lines. 



In considering the subject of breeding from the practical 

 standpoint it must always be remembered that the rank and file 

 of successful poultrymen are not in any sense of the word 

 scientific breeders. They know little or nothing about the sci- 

 ence of breeding and are only interested in it, if at all, in what 

 might be called a somewhat academic manner. Indeed it is 

 fair to say that many of those doctrines which the practical 

 poultry breeder usually holds to with the greatest firmness on 

 the supposition that they are ''scientific" principles of breeding 

 are things which modern exact scientific studies of heredity 

 have shown to be either quite erroneous or of exceedingly 

 limited applicability. What the successful practical poultry 

 breeder is an expert at, however, is the art of breeding. Pos- 

 sibly some who are interested only in the investigation of the 

 laws of inheritance may be inclined to doubt whether really 

 there is any such thing as an art of breeding, distinct from the 

 science of breeding. The contention might possibly be made 

 that what we call the art of breeding is merely a convenient 

 verbal shroud to cover the nakedness of the empiricism in 

 breeding, which in large part can now be reduced to scientific 

 principles and should ultimately be entirely so. This sounds 

 well in theory, but anyone who is disposed to maintain that there 

 is no such thing as an art or craft of breeding, quite apart from 

 the scientific side of the matter, should attempt once to produce, 

 on scientific principles, a winning male in the Barred Rock 

 class in the Madison Square Garden Poultr}^ Show, for exam- 

 ple. Let me hasten to say that no doubt this could be done. 

 But when it is done the person accomplishing it will in the 

 meantime have become something more than a student of the 

 science of inheritance. He will have become an expert practical 

 poultry breeder. 



