40 BAISING FOWLS AND EGGS 



great brooding-house — a long, glazed building fashioned like a 

 pitch-roof green-house, with a broadside aspect to the east and 

 south. The two and a half story building on the right (to which 

 this is attached) is a commodious dwelling-house for the attend- 

 ants, etc., and contains Mr. Baker's private office, the incubat- 

 ing-rooms, a dining-hall and other apartments above, while the 

 basement is devoted to store-rooms, boiler-rooms, electric bat- 

 tery apartment, heating apparatus, etc. 



Passing through the battery-chamber, we enter the incubat- 

 ing-apartment. Here are quietly produced thousands of chicks 

 by artificial heat, every week. This chamber is about twenty 

 feet square, protected by double sets of windows, and three 

 ranges of huge oblong incubators stand through the center; 

 while a lesser range, similarly constructed (each with eight tiers 

 of shallow egg-drawers, one above the other), runs around the 

 four sides of the room. 



The capacity of the hatching-drawers, or multiplied trays, in 

 these incubators is equal to the accommodation of about eight 

 thousand eggs at. a time, or, say, for turning out one hundred 

 and forty thousand chickens per year in this one spacious, 

 artificially-heated apartment. 



There is another room devoted to this same purpose, and Mr. 

 Baker is still further increasing his incubating works, with the 

 design of raising, during the coming year, a grand total of two 

 hundred and fifty thousand chicks ; for which, as they mature, 

 he has secured a cash market — when they shall have attained 

 from one and a half to three pounds weight each — for table 

 consumption in New York city, by the leading hotels there. 



Mr. Baker's thorough acquaintance with the manufacture of 

 steam-heating apparatus affords him rare advantages in " apply- 

 ing the principle " to chicken-incubating purposes. For many 

 years he was one of the eminent New York firm of Baker, 

 Smith & Co., known the world over in this line of business. 

 His plan of hatching chickens is briefly as follows : 



The gas for heating the incubators is manufactured upon the 

 premises. Beneath each machine is kept alight a single jet of 

 this gas to heat the water conveyed through pipes to the narrow 

 open chambers or vacuities over the surface of the eggs as they 

 rest in the trays while being hatched. This process constantly 

 gives to the eggs the required artificial heat, in form quite simi- 

 lar to the action of the warmth that descends from the natural 

 hen-mother's body when she is brooding over her eggs. An in- 

 genious, practical and most admirable arrangement this; for, 



