STRUCTURE AND GROWTH OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS. 645 
always remain uppermost. You may open any number of egys 
and you will always find that a little white speck stares you in 
the face. You may turn the egg as you please, but that little 
speck will always be uppermost. This is owing to the fact that 
the yolk is heavier in one portion and lighter in another and that 
it may swing upon the two strings of albumen by which it is sus- 
pended. This speck, called blastoderm by embryologists, is the 
part from which the young chick is developed when the egg is 
brought under proper conditions of temperature, etc. 
As to the albumen, or white, it is not one mass; it consists of 
a number of layers; and when you boil an egg so that the whole 
is hardened, it is easy to see that it peels off in these layers, 
which are deposited one after another. Now such an egg has a 
history. It does not begin to be an egg of that size; it does not 
begin with having a shell; it does not begin with having these 
membranes within the shell; it does not begin with having the 
white around the yolk. There is a time when the egg has neither 
shell, nor these membranes, nor the white, but when the whole egg 
is yolk; and you may find such eggs in the organ called the 
Ovary, in which the eggs are produced. If we look carefully at 
the ovary of the hen, we find that it contains a variety of eggs. 
It has eggs which have attained to their full size—they are about 
the size of a small walnut—it may contain a certain number of 
these—but by the side of these large yolks there are smaller 
yolks of various dimensions, and if you will examine minutely, 
you will soon see that there are those, which, at the distance of 
a few feet, you could not see at all, even if I represented them 
magnified a great many times; and you gradually, by learning to 
watch more and more closely, detect among this mass of eggs 
which are readily visible, others which are less and less distinct 
to the eye; and if you take a magnifying glass, you find that 
there are others which had escaped your eye when you had no 
Magnifying power to help you; and, if you use higher and higher 
power, yon begin to find that there are more of these most minute 
eggs, which loom up to your eye in proportion as you use a higher 
power of the microscope. It is like the starry heavens, where 
you have stars of first, second, fourth and tenth magnitude, some 
of which are visible to the naked eye, and others only through 
the telescopes of our observatories. Yet all these small specks in 
the ovary, invisible to the naked eye, are bona fide eggs. As soon 
