188 MY POULTRY DAY BY DAY 
alarm clock to go off just when you wish, neither can you get two 
eggs into twenty-four hours—that is, with regularity and dispatch. 
The domestic hen some years ago laid, say, 150 eggs in two years, 
and we can now guarantee her to lay the same number in one 
year. According to the theorists, every pullet is born with 3000 
potential eggs, but for practical politics one may take the first three 
figures as a working basis. If you can get your 300 eggs in one year 
you will save one year’s food and labour, and afterwards you can 
turn the hard-worked fowl out to grass so to speak. If you 
“force” your fowl by special feeding to lay 300 eggs in her first 
laying season, it would be asking too much of Nature to expect 
her to repeat the feat in her second year. No doubt she will be 
well worth keeping, especially for breeding purposes, but we cannot 
expect to squeeze 800 eggs a year out of her for ten years until 
she has laid her last “ potential” egg. No “dilution ” of labour 
will do it. 
What scientific breeders are doing now is to find out methods 
by which not one hen but all hens, so to speak, will increase their 
produce in the first year, or first and second year; of their existence. 
As an egg machine she will not pay to keep beyond her second 
laying year, or rather it will pay better to replace her with a pullet 
entering on her first season. 
SPEEDING UP THE HEN 
The invention of the trap-nest led to the era of speeding up the 
laying hen. She had been found guilty of procrastination in get- 
ting rid of her 3000 egg germs, or yolk sacs, and she was promptly 
sentenced to produce 200 per year for the first year and a few less 
the second. Anything over and above that number was to be 
accounted to her honour. The sentence was less a threat than an 
admonition, and she has responded nobly to the call. 
It began in this way. A strict watch was put upon her. A 
special nest was made that closed softly behind her, and she could 
not get out again till the poultryman liberated her. He had placed 
a number on her leg, and for every egg laid he marked a corre- 
