POULTRY-CRAFT. 147 
Good food and good care are not less important than good stock, but come 
later in order of time; and to justify their use one must give them to good 
stock. Food and care, though of the best, cannot make a good layer of a hen 
that is constitutionally a poor layer; or put a round full breast on the 
descendant of a line of flat breasted fowls; or clean color on the offspring of 
arace weak in color. It is in the failure to carefully select the specimens used 
in the breeding pens that most breeders,— not merely most breeders of Stand- 
ard fowls, but most breeders, most people who hatch and rear fowls, — fail 
to make their work pay. 
197. The Common Mistake.—One who keeps a dozen hens in his 
back yard and rears annually sixty to seventy chicks, selects a good male bird, 
perhaps paying a good price for him, then hatches from the eggs of the entire 
flock. His hens are a fair average of their kind, not uniform either in appear- 
ance or quality, some fairly good, some poor. That is about as such flocks 
run. According to the common theory, as the best hens lay the most eggs, 
and throw the strongest chicks, the greater proportion of the chicks reared 
will be from those best hens. That theory takes for granted several things 
that may not be so. The result desired is not impossible; it is improbable, 
if the eggs are hatched, as they usually are in such cases, by hens. See how 
it works. One point of improvement is to be prolificacy. The best and 
earliest layers are not always the first to go broody, but they are very likely to 
be. They are set on eggs from the flock. If any of their own eggs happen 
to be in the lot, such eggs are the poorest they had laid. These hens incubate 
for three weeks, remain with the broods for six or eight weeks more. So it 
happens that nearly all the chicks reared are from the poorer hens. Is it any 
wonder that results in grading up scrub stock and improving stock of poor 
quality are not always satisfactory? Selection implies separation. Separa- 
tion ts the object of selection. If two or three or more of the best of a dozen 
hens are separated from the flock, the poultry keeper can know that he is 
breeding from those hens, and no others. 
198. The Farmer’s Mistake. — It is a very usual practice for a farmer 
having a flock of, say, one hundred hens, when buying blood to improve his 
stock, to buy six or eight males of the dollar-and-a-half to two-dollar kind to 
run with the flock; then use for hatching eggs collected from the flock. The 
chances are against any considerable number of the few hundreds of chicks 
reared being from the best hens. If twelve or fifteen of the best had been 
separated from the general flock for the breeding season, and mated with a 
male worth two of the kind used, the eggs from these hens only could have 
been set, and more improvement made in the stock in one year than by follow- 
ing the hit avd miss method for three. 
199. The Breeder’s Mistake.— Many breeders of pure bred stock, who 
breed from a single pen, will use in that pen anything they may happen to 
