A POULTRY COMPENDIUM. 39 



than that supplied from above. Some breeders have 

 certainly had excellent success with brooders heated from 

 the bottom. A combination of top and bottom heat we 

 think might be an improvement upon either. 



THE CARE OF THE YOUNG CHICK. 



Childhood has ever been a fruitful theme for author 

 and poet ; its joys, its sorrows, its hopes, its aspirations, 

 its successes and its failures we all look back to, and 

 distance, in time as well as in space, "lends enchant- 

 ment to the view.'' But the sober statistician looks up- 

 on childhood in a very different way. To him it is a 

 period of numerous ailments and great mortality. Our 

 view of the childhood of a chicken, or the chickenhood 

 of a fowl, resembles more that of the statistician than 

 that of the poet. Tender days they are to be sure, but 

 tender physically rather than sentimentally. A chicken 

 is often but a frail flower, to-day it is, to-morrow it is 

 gone. Lice sap its vitality or the gape-worm does its 

 fatal work ; diarrhoea exhausts its strength, or constipa- 

 tion kindles a fever in its blood ; the scorching sun 

 burns out its little life, or the merciless rain extinguishes 

 its feeble light ; the careless feet of its mother trample 

 it to death, or the exposed pail of water becomes its 

 grave; while rats, cats, skunks, hawks, crows and owls 

 render the days terrible and the nights full of horror. 

 Despite them all, however, with proper care and wise 

 precautions the greater . proportion of the chicks hatched 

 may be reared to a useful maturity. 



If we bring up our chicks under a hen, as the most 

 of us undoubtedly do, we remove the hen and her 



