AMERICAN POULTRY CULTURE 
duce sound, thoroughly healthy stock—stock that 
has the ability to resist and reject disease—we must 
breed through several generations for health and 
vitality, the same as we would breed for other 
points of practical value, and so establish and per- 
petuate the habit of reproducing healthy specimens 
in future generations. It is probably true that a 
very large per cent. of the failures of beginners 
to get good hatches from their eggs, or to success- 
fully rear a large percentage of their chicks, is due 
to the neglect of these cardinal principles. 
Fowls with constitutional taint or which are 
otherwise debilitated, never did and never can, in 
the very nature of things, produce eggs that will 
hatch healthy, vigorous chicks. Fowls that show 
any symptoms of disease at all should never be 
bred from, and the same thing is true of birds that 
have at any time in the past been seriously ill, for, 
while they may have apparently recovered, there 
are nine chances to one there is yet and always 
will be a weak spot there somewhere, and the dis- 
ease is always liable to crop out again in the pro- 
geny at any time. Eggs from hens that have been 
forced for great egg production during the winter 
months are always more or less weak-germed in 
the spring, and give correspondingly poor hatches 
and weak chicks. The same kind of results usually 
come from eggs laid by late-hatched pullets which 
are not fully developed and matured. 
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