CHAPTER XXVIII 
IMPORTANCE OF EARLY HATCHING 
business as thoroughly as men do in other industries. 
One asks the awkward question because one so often 
sees the average egg-farmer fail to do the right thing at the right 
moment. 
There is, for instance, for three months of every year literally 
a famine in eggs. In October, November and December it is 
almost impossible to buy eggs, and when they can be purchased 
the price is out of all proportion—I will not say to their worth, 
but to what they fetch at other seasons of the year. So common, 
so recurrent has this annual famine become that most people, 
including, I fear, large numbers of poultry-keepers, have come to 
look upon it as something ordained by Nature. It is simply taken 
for granted that for one quarter of the year—the last three months 
—eggs cannot be got in quantities. Now this is exactly the re- 
verse of the truth. For thousands of years Nature—with a capital 
N—has been impressing upon us the fact that eggs can be laid in 
October, November and December as easily as in any other three 
months of the year. 
Most people seem to take it for granted that it is the cold and the 
wild weather that prevents the pullets from laying. Of course 
it is nothing of the kind. If it were so eggs would be scarcer in 
the first three months of the year than they are in the last three, 
for as a rule the weather is worst, the frost at its hardest, the 
thermometer at its lowest, the snow most persistent during January, 
February and March, when there is a perfect orgy of egg-laying. 
April is usually the best egg month of the year, and it is oftenest 
the wildest from a weather point of view. In 1916, when frost 
and snowstorms were at their worst in March and April, I got 
240 
QC) NE often wonders whether the poultry-keeper knows his 
