54 Maine; agricultural experiment station. 1909. 



1. In the first place an examination of the totals shows that 

 only 217 out of the 250 pullets supposedly in the experiment 

 are accounted for in the table. The remainder of the 250, 

 namely, 33 birds, do not appear in the table for one or another 

 of the following .reasons : Such birds may have lost their leg 

 bands as chickens and hence lost their individual pedigree con- 

 nection, though still known to be the daughters of some 200 egg 

 hen. Or there may have been failure to make any note of the 

 chick bands originally put on. In dealing with the results of 

 the experiment it has been deemed wisest to leave all pullets 

 not having definite pedigree records out of account. 



2. It is further to be noted that two of the mother hens — 

 Nos. Ill and 614 — have an interrogation mark in the column 

 devoted to the mother's egg records. The reason for this omis- 

 sion lies in the fact that in the past egg records of the Station 

 there are two birds recorded as each having a band number iii 

 and also laying over 200 eggs, and there are two birds each 

 having a band number 614, and each recorded as having laid 

 over 200 eggs. There is nothing in the records of the present 

 experiment, or in the memory of those who had the details of 

 the work in hand to tell which of these duplicate birds were the 

 ones actually used in this work. Consequently, it is impossible 

 to insert in the table any egg record for them. It is certain, 

 however, that they were both in the "registered" class. 



3. Another point which needs discussion is that not all the 

 mother birds laid 200 eggs or over between November i of their 

 pullet year and November i of the following year. In looking 

 through the records of the mothers whose band numbers are 

 entered in the first column of the table it was found that they 

 fell into three classes, as follows: (a) Those birds that laid 

 200 or more eggs between November i of their pullet year and 

 November i of the following year, (b) Birds that laid 200 

 eggs in a year (365 days) forward from the day on which 

 they laid their first egg. (c) Birds which neither laid 200 eggs 

 between November i and November i, nor in the year forward 

 from the date of their first laying, but which only fell a few 

 eggs short of doing one or the other of these two things. Such 



