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minded people who could not understand the truth even it' it came to 

 them through the mail. 



The majority of poultry keepers who arc looking for instruction are 

 bright, intelligent people and have wit enough and education enough 

 'o understand anything that seriously interests Iheni, if it be presented 

 fairly without circumlocution and evasion. There is nothing anymore 

 mysterious about a hen and her performance than there is about any 

 other members of the animal kingdom and their functions. The air 

 of mystery has been maintained because it paid, and because the hen 

 has not been generally studied as an individual. 



We cannot keep poultry or engage in any business or pursuit in- 

 telligently unless we start right. Our thinking and our work must be 

 founded upon the bed rock of fact, not the shifting 1 sands of superstition, 

 popular misinformation and commercial humbug. 



Any degree of merit in our fowls begins with the egg. Just as 

 worthless a chick (to us) can emanate from a fifty-cent egg as from a 

 one-cent egg. Vet it pays to get high priced eggs when we know just 

 what we want, and have reason to believe that our chances for getting 

 some of it are contained in those particular eggs. If the mysterious 

 principle that determines future excellence in any direction is not 

 present in the vitalized germ of the egg that is to produce the chick no 

 method of feeding or care ever devised will cause the resultant life to 

 be of genuine value. No matter how good the breeding may be it will 

 all come to naught unless the chick is enabled to grow and develop 

 sufficiently well to prove its breeding 1 . 



At this point we rind one of the greatest bugaboos of the whole busi- 

 ness. Being bred right the chick must be hatched right and provided 

 with suitable food and care. Allot these factors combined determine 

 the extent of future excellence: no single one can be credited with all 

 of the success and not always with failure. Vet how common it is to 

 select a single element upon which to bestow the whole credit or blame, 

 as the case may come out. Usually that which we purchased is con- 

 demned when results are bad, and that which we ourselves provide is 

 held blameless. 



To my way of looking at things many much-jecominended methods of 

 .. poultry maintenance have evolved from a general attempt to get good 

 results from ill-begotten, or poorly-hatched or -grown stock. Too 

 many hens give grand results in egg production under conditions that 

 many suppose to be wholly bad, for this point to be ignored. While it 

 is apparently true that egg production is often controlled by agencies 

 that are not yet fully understood, it also seems to be true that a hen 

 with a bred-in-the-bone egg producing tendency will give a more profit- 

 able egg yield under ordinary conditions of maintenance than the ordinary 

 "laver caii possibly do under the most approved scientific methods. 



What are we to say of the pullets hatched in June and not removed 

 from their out-door brooders until November: crowded, always in the 

 way, forty of them wintered in a shed 11x12 and roosting room 11x6, 

 some of them laving over 2n;t e^ii^ each before they were eighteen 

 months old? We know that this is a bad and a risky way to raise 

 chickens, but we also know that these chicks were well hatched from 

 eggs laid by healthy, vigorous hens with a known, individual, persistent- 

 laving habit, at a time favorable for strong prepotent fertility. That is 



