in their ancestry, had tuberculosis, canker, or any constitutional 

 weakness, it will invariably crop out, or come to the surface with 

 this mating. For this is inbreeding. 



"Ah!" you say, "I have done this and now I'm stuck. Now 

 what shall I do?" You have bred two years and must have some 

 youngsters very near approaching your ideal. If you have 

 started with three or four pairs you have we will say eight 

 units on which to start or eight entirely different bloods. You 

 now have four pens of youngsters. Two pens having 3-4 and 1-4 

 respectively the blood of the cock, and two pens having the blood 

 of the hen in the same proportion. 



I will now try to tell you what not to do and a little later 

 what to do. 



Don't out-cross — that is, buy a bird simply because he won 

 some coveted ribbon and is a typical specimen, because by so 

 doing you may introduce blood into your strain which will force 

 you to begin all over again. 



No matter how poor your birds were at the start, if you had 

 some special object in view you must have made some headway. 

 Of course, the better your birds were at the start the sooner you 

 will show birds. The fancier who constantly buys birds for 

 crossing, unless he knows the blood, rarely succeeds. 



Every variety has various points to consider, some being 

 harder to attain than others, consequently of more value. Fix 

 your eye on the hardest and keep it there, continually working 

 for it. Ycu can catch the others as you go along. Should luck 

 throw in- your pathway a particularly desirable specimen from 

 one of your matings, don't sell it. It may do your strain ir- 

 reparable injury to do so. In fact that bird will probably be the 

 corner stone of your success. Again if a pair of your birds pro- 

 duce uniformly good specimens do not break them up, but breed 

 them as long as they will breed. 



Don't get impatient, you must work and wait if you want to 

 learn what scientific breeding means. By this time you will 

 be able to understand why so few make a success of more than 

 one strain. 



Don't go for every point at once, your strain will be a failure 

 if you do. 



11 



