98 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 
CHAPTER XIX. 
FINAL REMARKS ON CONSTITUTIONAL VIGOR AND VITALITY. 
As we have now reached the end of ‘‘The Call of the Hen,” I wish 
to impress upon the reader’s mind the importance of the five propositions 
that govern the Selection, Breeding, and Profitable Keeping of Poultry 
as follows: Capacity, Condition, Type, Prepotency, and Vitality or 
Constitutional Vigor. 
No doubt you have a good working knowledge of the first four 
subjects, and you wonder why I have not written a chapter on Vitality. 
The reason is, that when I decided to write ‘‘The Call of the Hen,” 
I told my wife that I would write nothing that even a blind man could 
not understand and practice. I have tried to do so, for to her patience, 
perseverance, and untiring zeal I owe much of the success I have had 
in getting out this book. 
The writer can see only three ways of detecting vitality in a fowl: 
the most ancient is intuition, then observation, and lastly the trap-nest. 
A hen may be a typical 250-egg type hen, she may have the very best 
of care and food, and yet, for lack of vitality, may not be able to lay 
over 150 eggs per year. Let us take the steam engine for example. 
There are a great many types of engines besides the high and low- 
pressure ones, as there are a great many types of hens and cock birds. 
The diameter of cylinder, length of stroke, and revolutions per minute 
give you the capacity of the engine, as the length and depth of abdomen 
in the fowl gives its capacity. The fuel fed into the fire-box generates 
the steam (vitality) to run the engine, as the food fed into the hen’s 
abdomen generates her vitality. 
The writer has owned steam engines where there was defective 
fire-box construction—scale in the boiler and tubes, loose rings in the 
piston head, cylinder worn out of true, and other defects that reduced 
the efficiency of the power system a great deal—or, in other words, 
lowered the vitality of the engine. In just the same way a weak digestive 
system in a 250-egg type hen will reduce her egg-yield. But do not 
think that you can make a 150-egg type hen in perfect condition lay 
200 eggs by any of the feeding formulas now in vogue. If you try to 
force her, she will go to flesh and then break down with liver trouble. 
If you lack the intuitive faculty and lack the time to carefully observe 
individual hens, I would advise you to select the hens by the chart you 
wish to breed from. When they are about a year old you can breed 
from them. Then, if you wish to breed from only those with the greatest 
vitality, trap-nest these hens for the next two or three years. The hens 
with the greatest vitality will be great layers and strong, vigorous birds, 
and save the time wasted in trap-nesting a lot of birds that you will 
eventually have to discard. 
