RANKIN'S DUCK BOOK 



detail, there were not hours enough in the twenty-four to 

 answer them. This book was published to meet these queries 

 and give our patrons our method of growing, supposing it 

 would cover all the points in duck-culture, but it does not as 

 yet answer the ends. The questions still come in far beyond 

 our ability to answer, and as our fifth edition is about ex- 

 hausted, we now publish a sixth, revised, enlarged and illus- 

 trated; also adding a Question Bureau, which will answer 

 many of the questions which have reached us during the past 

 few years concerning the growing, as well as the diseases to 

 which the Pekin duck is subject. Though we were in this 

 business for nearly forty years, and were eminently successful, 

 we do not claim to know all about it ; but by persistent effort, 

 careful selection and breeding, succeeded in developing a 

 mammoth strain of Pekin ducks, which, for symmetry, pre- 

 cocity and fecundity, stand unrivalled on this continent. 



Many of our customers at that time wrote us that their 

 birds averaged from 150 to 165 eggs per season. We would 

 say that there is no domestic bird under so perfect control, 

 so free from diseases of all kinds, or from insect parasites as 

 the Pekin duck. From the time the little bird is hatched 

 until it is full grown and ready to reproduce its own species, 

 it is under the perfect control of the intelligent operator, who 

 can produce feathers, flesh or bone at will, and even mature 

 the bird and compel it to lay at four-and-a-half months old- 

 There is no bird in existence that will respond to kind treat- 

 ment, generous care and feed as the Pekin duck. On the 

 other hand, there is no bird more susceptible to improper feed 

 or neglect, and a sad mortality is sure to follow among the 

 little ones, where proper food and system are wanting. It 

 may surprise some one to know that the predisposition to 

 disease may exist in the egg from which "the little bird is 

 hatched, or even in the condition of the parent bird which 

 produces the egg. Strong physique in animal life, as in man, 

 are like exotics, requiring the most assiduous care and culti- 

 vation, and are the most difficult to transmit. 



Defects, like weeds, seem indigenous to the soil and will 

 reproduce with unerring regularity, and will often crop out 

 in all directions, generations after you think you have wiped 

 it all out. So it is one thing to produce an egg from good, 

 strong, vigorous stock during the winter in inclement weather, 

 when all nature is against you, and so poorly fertilized that 

 if it hatches at all, will hatch a chick so enfeebled in construc- 

 tion that no amount of petting or coaxing can induce it to 

 live, but quite another to produce an egg so highly vitalized, 



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