86 POULTRY 
breeding stock. Further, 90 per cent of the 
successful poultrymen in that section of the 
country where the author resides use nothing 
but pullets as breeders. They not only use 
no old hens at all, but they have carried on 
this system of breeding for from five to 
twelve years and are as uniformly successful 
to-day as they have been at any time in the 
past. 
Vitality Maintained. There has been 
no apparent depreciation in the size, the 
vigor, the vitality, or the stamina of the 
present-day stock. When a poultryman can 
keep twelve hundred laying pullets and use 
the best five hundred of these as breeding 
stock, can produce eggs which will average 
to hatch 65 per cent of the total number of 
eggs incubated, and when the mortality of 
the resulting chickens for season after season 
of breeding will average not over 12 to 15 
per cent and frequently as low as from 3 to 
5 per cent, it is apparent that there has been 
no appreciable lowering of the vitality of the 
stock 
Further, these chickens are being managed 
so that at four months the cockerels of such 
