130 POULTRY FOR PROFIT 



enough for her to lay a couple of dozen eggs in the 

 spring. This gave her as large a family as she 

 wished to raise. Why should she worry about more? 



It is a far cry from the jungle fowl of the dim and 

 misty past to the domestic hen of the twentieth cen- 

 tury with her record of 300 eggs a year, and yet one 

 little word bridges over the whole of the distance, 

 just one word, "breeding." The twentieth century 

 hen lays from 200 to 300 eggs a year because she 

 has been bred to lay. Feeding and care have gone 

 hand in hand with breeding, but they would have 

 counted but little except for the selection, year after 

 year, decade after decade, of the best fowls. Per- 

 haps the selection has not always been very intel- 

 ligent. Very likely it has been in many cases the 

 survival of the fittest. Nevertheless, somehow or 

 other the domesticated, laying hen, with her more 

 or less high production, has been evolved out of that 

 insignificant ancestor. What has been done can be 

 done again, and it will be more effectively accom- 

 plished because of some things we understand now 

 which were not understood even 20 years ago. 



Fall laying, it must always be remembered, is 

 contrary to nature. Spring is the natural mating 

 season for birds and animals. Mother Nature her- 

 self is back of it all, and it is not easy to change the 

 nature of things. 



Egg-laying is reproduction, nothing more, and it 

 is said that the pullets and cockerels which are most 

 strongly sexed — that is, that show their sex earliest 

 — are the pullet which can most easily be induced 

 to lay out of the natural reproductive season, and 

 the cockerel which will transmit this quality from 

 mother to granddaughter. The question is an in- 

 tricate and interesting one and worthy of the most 

 careful attention of scientists and breeders. 



