130 POULTR?-CRAFT. 
the earliest period of laying, a pullet is usually making growth of bone, 
muscle and feathers, and producing eggs at the same time. The eggs are of 
necessity small, and it is a good plan to postpone laying until the bird is well 
developed. This can be done by shifting the pullets frequently from pen to 
pen. 
As the mean temperature of the atmosphere falls lower and lower, more and 
more of the food consumed goes to keep up the heat of the body. The mash 
should be a rich one, heavy in corn meal and meat— and fed warm. Corn 
can be fed quite freely, and provision made for a constant and liberal supply 
of cut bone or meat scraps. For feeding at this time no better vegetable than 
cabbage can be found, and split and damaged cabbage can be had at this 
season for the hauling, or for a merely nominal price. Sound cabbages are 
often very cheap, and if one who cannot grow them himself is prepared to 
buy what he needs for the winter now, cabbages may be about as cheap a 
green food as can be had; bought later, they will probably cost several times 
the fall price. It would, of course, be possible to keep the fowls comfortable 
in cool weather by giving less heating food, and closing the houses up more 
at night; but that system tends to keep fowls soft; while, as long as the 
weather is not too cold, heating food and a cool house harden, while keeping 
them comfortable. 
Now as long as the weather continues fine and quite uniform, though slowly 
growing colder, both hens and pullets will do so well that the poultryman 
will begin to make estimates of what the egg yield will be by Thanksgiving 
Day, at the present rate of increase. 
Then possibly there comes a sudden fall in the temperature —a fall of 50° 
to 60° Fahrenheit in a few hours, is not unusual at this season — and a change 
of 80° may occur inside of twenty-four hours. The demand of the body for heat 
is enormously increased. If the poultryman can now keep his fowls warm 
enough so that there is no sudden check to egg production, all is well. If the 
cold snap is of short duration, everything goes on as before. If the weather 
remains permanently cooler, one has only to take better care of the hens for a 
few days until they become accustomed to the change:—as healthy hens do 
very quickly; but if the poultryman fails to make such provision as is in his 
power to counteract the effect of the change in the weather; or, if the fall in 
temperature is so great as to check laying in spite of all that he can do, the 
effects of the change do not pass away with the return to settled warmer 
weather, and if changes follow each other rapidly, numerous slight shocks 
have sometimes a worse effect than one extreme shock. In many cases the 
shock to the system of the hen does not end with the stoppage of egg produc- 
tion. Consider what laying is — what an egg is. Consider how any shock to 
an animal organism acts upon the reproductive system, and this effect in turn 
reacts upon the whole system. Similar instances are numerous in other lines 
of animal life. When a change of weather causes a hen to stop laying, there 
will be no more eggs laid until the system has had time to recuperate. The 
time needed is long or short, as the shock to the system was more or less 
