A POULTRY COMPENDIUM. 35 



sit, but if your nesi has been made as has been recom- 

 mended and you have faithfully sprinkled her with sul- 

 phur, your chicks will be free from lice. The trouble 

 is, many forget to do this, and the little ones are 

 hatched out, and in a week or two begin to die, all be- 

 cause of that "lousy nuisance,'' a sitting hen. 



3d. You can hatch out a large number at a time, 

 so as to have many of the same age to select from, 

 whereas if you had depended upon hens for incubation 

 you might have been obliged to wait a long time before 

 you could have found a sufficient number of hens, which 

 desired to sit at the same time, to accomplish your pur- 

 pose. 



4th. By using an incubator you can keep your hens 

 laying and, from a small stock of finely bred hens, raise 

 a mjich larger number of chicks than if you allowed 

 them to sit. 



5th. If you are raising the non-sitting breeds, you 

 will be obliged either to keep some sitters, buy, borrow, 

 beg or steal sitters of your neighbors when hatching time 

 comes around, or rely upon your incubator. The latter 

 is what you are quite likely to do. 



These, and perhaps other advantages, have made the 

 subject of artificial incubation popular, and have stimu- 

 lated inventive genius to produce something which will 

 successfully take the place of the sitting hen. 



Observation of what the hen does, will teach us 

 what an incubator ought to do. In the first place we 

 find that a hen sits steadily, seldom leaving her nest, for 

 the first four or five days. By placing a thermometer 

 under her we find that her heat is about 103 decrees. 



