10 EAISING FOWLS AND EGGS 



many thousands of eggs ; and when the hatching takes place, 

 the sight is not a little curious. 



The natives who rear the young ducks in the surrounding 

 country know exactly the day when they will be ready for re- 

 moval ; and in two days after the shell is burst, the whole of 

 the little creatures are sold and conveyed to their new quar- 

 ters, where — with the natural heat of that hot climate, and 

 proper attention to their needs, the ducks are subsequently 

 raised to advantage, and are sold usually when a third or half 

 grown, for the tables of the mandarins or the foreign resident 

 merchants. 



This may answer in China. But such a method (even if 

 we any of us understood it, which we do not), is quite im- 

 practicable on this side of the water. The incubating processes 

 of Enoiish and American inventors, as we have observed, 

 proved failures — in the main — except by way of experiment, 

 in the hands of the originators, themselves. And in spite of 

 the utterly unwarrantable theory of such visionaries as Geo. C. 

 Geyeliu and Lewis Wright, who assume that artificial hatching 

 and the rearing of chickens is an absolutely necessary accessory 

 to any large fowl-breeding establishment, we undertake to af- 

 firm that up to this time, in the year of our Lord eighteen 

 hundred and seventy-seven, there is not existing nor has tliere 

 ever 3-et been invented, an eccaleobeon, an incubator, a hatch- 

 ing-house, a hot-bed, or other contrivances of this character, in 

 France, England, or America, that was practically worth one 

 sixpence in the hands of a novice, for wholesale production of 

 chickens from fowls' eggs. 



Mr. Geyelin, is unquestionably a gentleman, and a well- 

 meaning man. But his proposition is utterly impracticable, at 

 least in the United States. And his prescribed mode of artifi- 

 cial hatching can never succeed, in either England or America, 

 profitably — since all experiments in this direction have proved 

 failures from their excessive prime cost, and the subsequent 

 disasters that attend the attempts to raise the chickens pro- 

 duced in this manner, in a cold climate. It cannot be done, 



