1882.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
51 
Poultry House Conveniences. 
The raising of poultry year by year is re¬ 
ceiving more attention, and anything that 
• will add to the ease in management is gladly 
welcomed by the admirers of the feathered 
tribe. The practice among farmers of letting 
their poultry roost about the farm buildings, 
upon harrows, plows, wagons, and farm ma¬ 
chinery is growing less each year, as many 
of them are building suitable poultry houses. 
In the engraving is shown a neat and handy 
arrangement in perches, of which r, r, r, are 
scantling, eight feet in length, two inches 
thick, and three inches wide, made of some 
tough light wood. The upper ends are 
hinged to the side of the building, four feet 
apart, and are connected with roosts or 
perches one inch in diameter, or what is bet¬ 
ter nail octagon strips fast to the supports. 
Perches should be placed about one foot 
apart. At any time when it is desired to 
gather up the droppings, the end of the 
frame-work is raised sufficiently to engage 
with the hook on the support n, the whole 
arrangement being up out of the way, for 
thorough cleaning. At the corner of the build- 
INTERIOR OF CONVENIENT POULTRY HOUSE. 
ing, opposite the roost, is placed a box, p, con¬ 
taining ashes, road dust, etc., that the fowls 
may dust themselves. The box should be 
two feet square and about one foot in hight, 
and should be kept half filled with dusting 
material, more particularly during winter. 
In the comer is placed a box, e, and should 
contain a supply of gravel and broken oyster 
or clam shells. The foregoing conveniences 
cost but little and will prove valuable addi¬ 
tions to any poultry house. L. D. S. 
ISal>1>its or Hares.—It may be well, 
now that we have in mind the subject of 
cheap food, to remind farmers that they, as a 
general thing, overlook or reject in the Rab¬ 
bit a kind of food that city people, in its sea¬ 
son, look to for both its cheapness and excel¬ 
lence. It may be that from the injury they 
sometimes do young fruit trees, farmers look 
upon rabbits as vermin, but whatever the 
reason, the fact remains that farmers ordi¬ 
narily do not make use of these animals as 
food. During the early winter months (their 
sale later being unlawful), we find them, 
at the current market prices, not only a 
cheap, but a choice form of animal food. 
Our animals, called rabbits, are all hares, but 
as they are best known as rabbits, we will 
call them so. They are easily trapped or shot, 
and those who, from any prejudice, reject 
them, forego that which many regard as ex¬ 
cellent food. Rabbits, more than a year old, 
or the young ones towards the opening of 
spring, are dry and tough, and not 'desirable, 
but from September onward, they are excel¬ 
lent. As with other wild animals, their flesh 
is exceedingly digestible, and though some¬ 
what dry, this can be remedied by the man¬ 
ner of cooking. One method is to cut up the 
rabbit in small pieces and stew thoroughly 
with water enough to make a rich gravy, and 
serve with boiled rice. They are very accept¬ 
able if cut in pieces and fried somewhat, 
and then water enough be added to make a 
brown stew, or they may be cooked in a pie, 
made like other meat pies, with potatoes, 
and using onions, etc., for seasoning. . 
Amounts Lost from Various Foods through 
N on-Assimilation. 
BY PROP. P. H. STORER, DEAN OP SCHOOL OP AGRICUL¬ 
TURE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
As the readers of agricultural literature are 
no doubt aware, a large amount of labor has 
already been expended of late years by chem¬ 
ists in determining the comparative digesti¬ 
bility of many of the more important kinds 
of fodders which serve for feeding animals ; 
and much knowledge of very high value has 
been gained by these researches. As a nat¬ 
ural consequence of the success which has 
attended these investigations of the food of 
cattle, renewed attention has been given to 
questions relating to human foods ; and, now 
that the methods of investigation have been 
sufficiently perfected, several physiologists 
have succeeded in experiments made with 
men, in the same general way as those pre¬ 
viously made with animals. That is to say, 
they have determined the comparative di¬ 
gestibility, or assimilability, of a number of 
foods which are in common domestic use. 
It has been found, however, much more diffi¬ 
cult to carry out these “ digestibility experi¬ 
ments ” with men than with animals, because 
it is by no means easy for any one to continue 
to eat the same kind of food long enough for 
a satisfactory experiment. It is of course 
highly desirable in such trials to avoid 
complex mixtures of foods, in order that 
the degree of digestibility of any one par¬ 
ticular kind may be determined with the ut¬ 
most certainty. But, no matter how palata¬ 
ble a simple food may be to a man at first, it 
has been found that it will, almost certainly, 
become repugnant to him after four or five 
days. It then not only disgusts him to such 
an extent that a great effort has to be made 
in order to swallow it, but it is liable to bring 
on trouble in the bowels and to cause diar¬ 
rhoea. Most persons, doubtless, are apt to 
believe that any one might easily live for 
several days on bread alone, or on milk, or 
eggs, or meat; or even on potatoes, rice, or 
Indian meal; for in some parts of the world, 
as is well known, entire populations are nour¬ 
ished well-nigh exclusively by one or another 
of these substances. But it has been found 
by the German experimenters that none of 
these things, taken by themselves, are adapted 
for feeding Europeans. In civilized com¬ 
munities every one is so accustomed to a 
varied diet that comparatively few persons 
can be found who are able to eat a single 
substance for several days consecutively, and 
many people are forced to give up the trial 
after a few meals, no matter how strong 
their desire to persist may be. In the experi¬ 
ments now in question, it was quite excep¬ 
tional to find persons, in any walk of life, 
who could continue to eat large quantities of 
simple, plain food for tolerably long periods 
—a fact, by the way, which strikingly illus¬ 
trates and emphasizes the importance of a 
varied diet, in ordinary life. 
Most of the figures of the following table 
were deduced by Rubner, of Munich, from 
the results of a very elaborate and painstak¬ 
ing research made by him : 
Kind of Food Eaten. 
Percent¬ 
age of the 
Dry Food 
list as 
Excre¬ 
ment 
Percentage of the 
Nitrogen 
Of the F 
goes to Wc 
Excre 
Carbo¬ 
hydrates 
ood which 
iste in the 
ment. 
Mixed Diet. 
51 
f 
t 
Flesh.. 
5 or 6 
2 or 3 
— 
Eg’gS ........ . ....... 
9i 
Miik.. .. 
8 to 10 
7 to 12 
6 to 11 
3 to 5 
Legumes ... 
f 
104 
Kice.... 
4 
25 
1 
Hominy.... 
6* 
19 
34 
Potatoes ...... .. 
9i 
38 
74 
Maccaroni.... .. 
4i 
17 
14 
Maccaroni and Gluten... 
Si 
11 
2J 
A kind of Cake, called 
“Spsetzel ”... 
5 
2C4 
14 
Butter, with some Bread 
and Beef. .. 
7 
11 
6 
Fat Bacon, with some 
Bread and Beef. 
84 to 9} 
12 to 14 
2 to 6 
Butter and Bacon, with 
some Bread and Beef.. 
10J 
9 
7 
White Bread. 
3J to 5* 
19 to 26 
1 to 14 
Coarse Kye Bread (Black 
Bread). 
15 
32 
11 
Cabbage. 
15 
184 
154 
Lellow Beets. 
21 
39 
18 
Beer. 
54 
? 
? 
It is to be observed that the figures of the 
second column of the table give no more than 
an approximate idea of the value of each of 
the foods enumerated. A more precise con¬ 
ception of these values may be had by com¬ 
paring the figures of column two with those 
in the third and fourth columns, which give 
the percentage amounts of Nitrogen and of 
Carbohydrates that have escaped assimila¬ 
tion. It is noteworthy that the chemical 
composition of dung is often very unlike that 
of the food from which it has been derived. 
It does not at all follow, for example, that 
the dung will be . highly nitrogenized when 
food has been eaten which is particularly rich 
in nitrogenous constituents, for it may hap¬ 
pen in this case that a large portion of the 
Nitrogen is voided in the urine. Rubner 
found, for instance, 6‘/ 2 per cent of Nitrogen 
in dry excrement from a meat diet, though 
the flesh had contained 14 per cent of Nitro¬ 
gen ; in dry excrement from milk he found 
but little more than 4 per cent of Nitrogen ; 
while he found as much as 8 per cent of 
Nitrogen in the excrement from white bread, 
which, as compared with meat and milk, is a 
substance to be regarded as poor in Nitrogen. 
On referring to column four of the table, it 
will be seen that much larger amounts of 
Nitrogen, went to waste in the case of vege¬ 
tables which were themselves poor in Nitrogen 
than in that of the so-called animal foods, 
such as flesh, eggs, and milk, which contain 
a large proportion of this element. Indeed, 
it is probable that the Nitrogen in the ani¬ 
mal foods is really assimilated well-nigh com¬ 
pletely, and that the larger part of what little 
Nitrogen is actually found in the dung from 
such foods is actually part and parcel of cer¬ 
tain biliary products, secreted from the body, 
which have done duty in the process of di¬ 
gestion. In this view of the matter, such 
excremental Nitrogen cannot properly be 
classed with that wasted from the food 
through non-assimilation. Some of this bili¬ 
ary Nitrogen occurs, of course, in all excre¬ 
ment, about as much in one kind as in another, 
