EXPERIMENT STATION WORK 
many flocks, many locations, and many years needed to 
prove the superiority of the contrasted methods. 
The criticisms in the following section will amply illustrate 
the case of foreign factors being unwisely introduced into an 
experiment. 
The Egg Breeding Work at the Maine Station. 
As is well known the Maine Station was for years consid- 
ered by all poultrymen to be doing a great and beneficial 
work in breeding for increased egg production. Up until the 
fall of 1907, the poultrymen of the country were of the opin- 
ion that this work was in every way successful, and a large 
number of private breeders had taken up the use of trap- 
nests in an effort to build up the egg production of their 
fowls. 
When early in 1908 Bulletin 157 of the Maine Experiment 
Station was published, it showed by averages as given in the 
table on page 202 that the egg yield at the station was for 
the entire period on the decline. In Bulletin 157, the state- 
ment was made that “arithmatical mistakes” and “faulty sta- 
tistical methods” accounted for the discrepancies between the 
former publications and the criticised data. The further ex- 
planation that “the experiment was a success as an experi- 
ment,” etc., only appeared to the public mind as a graceful 
way of explaining what was, to the practical~man, an utter 
failure of the entire work. 
The unfortunate death of Professor Gowell, together with 
the fact that he had equipped a private poultry farm with 
station stock, added to the confusion, and the result of the 
bulletin was the precipitation of a general “pow-wow” in 
which the poultry editors were about equally divided between 
those who were casting insinuations upon the personnel of the 
station, and those who decried the whole effort toward improv- 
ing the egg yield. 
After going over the publications of Professor Gowell, visit- 
ing the station and meeting the present force, I came to the 
following conclusions regarding the matter: 
Professor Gowell’s work is open to severe criticism. Errors 
have been made in conducting the work at Maine which have 
made it possible for a mathematical biologist to take the data 
and seemingly prove that selection, as practiced by Professor 
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