Management. Care AND Feeding. 51 



should have hard boiled eggs chopped fine, and stale bread crumbs 

 and scalded milk, baked corn bread crumbled in scalded milk, 

 coarse oatmeal, broken wheat, millet seed, cut onions, steamed 

 rowen, shreds of lean meat, and such like food that suits the tender 

 stomach and digestive organs, and that is nutritive. After this time 

 coarser and stronger food may be given, but always accompanied 

 with milk, if it can be gotten handy. A variety is best at all times, 

 so it can be broken corn, baked bread, scaled oatmeal and barley- 

 meal, cornmeal and middlings, broken wheat, vegetables, meat or 

 fish in rotation. 



Feeding the Old.— A variety of food is also best suited for 

 adult fowls; ground oats and corn, wheat, buckwheat, barley, and 

 a little corn, vegetables and roots, middlings, bran, fresh meat or 

 insects will make an acceptable variety. It is best lo keep the fowls 

 in good condition without being fat, if eggs and healthy chickens are 

 the most desired. 



Effects of Food. — The effects of food on the animal economy 

 is therefore a subject of great importance, whether it be applied to 

 man, animals or birds, and the words of Letheby fitly apply to this 

 subject. " That the various alimentary substances made use of by 

 man and animals, contain at least four classes of constituents, each 

 of which performs its own assigned function in the living animal 

 economy. If the substance contains nitrogen, it seems most fitted 

 for the nourishment of tissue, and has been called plastic or nitro- 

 genous; if it is deficient in nitrogen, and has an excess of carbon or 

 hydrogen, it appears to undergo combustion in the body, and is 

 called hydrogenous, or a respiratory element of food (hydro carbon) ; 

 if it is fatty in its nature, it performs the double duty of maintaining 

 animal warmth, and of assisting in the assimilation of nitrogenous 

 compounds, and lastly, if it is saline in its quality, it goes to build 

 up the solid textures of the animal frame, and aids the important 

 work of carrying new materials into the system, and old or effete 

 matter out of it." 



Man, animals or poultry cannot maintain health if their food 

 does not contain all of these constituents, and common instinct with 

 experience, tells us that these classes must be associated in due pro- 

 portions, under a variety of modifying circumstances. 



