150 
December 2. 
THE COTTAGE GAEDENER. 
“ All oliieks do not get out so easily, but many reqriiro a 
little assistance. The difllculty is, to know when to give it. 
They often succeed in making the first breach, but appear 
unable to batter down their dungeon walls any further. A 
rash attempt to help them by breaking the shell, particularly 
in a downward direction towards the smaller end, is often 
followed by a loss of blood, which can ill be spai'ed. It is 
better to wait awhile and not interfere with any of them, till 
it is apparent that a part of the brood have been hatched 
some time, say twelve hours, and that the rest cannot 
succeed in making their appearance. After sirch wise delay, 
it will generally be found that the whole fluid contents of 
the egg, yolk and all, are taken up into the body of the 
chick, and that weakness alone has prevented^ its forcing 
itself out. The causes of such wealmess are various ; some¬ 
times insufficient warmth, from the hen having sat on too 
many eggs ; sometimes tlie original feebleness of the vital 
spark included in the egg, but most frequently staleness of 
the eggs employed for incubation. The chances of rearing 
such chicks are small, but if they get over the first twenty- 
four hours they may be considered as safe. Hut all the 
old wives’ nostrums to recover them are to be discarded: 
the merest drop of ale may be a useful stimulant, but an 
intoxicated chick is as liable to sprawl about and have the 
breath trodden out of its body as a fainting one. Pepper¬ 
corns, gin, rue, and fifty other ways of doctoring, are to be 
banished afar, together with their subjects, namely— 
* All the unaocompUshed works of Nature’s hand, 
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, 
Kiubryos, and idiots, eremites, and friars. 
Into a Limbo larpe and broad, since called 
The Paradise of Fools, to few tiriknown.' 
“ The only thing to be done, is to take them from the hen 
till she is settled at night, keeping them in the meanwhile as 
snug and warm as possible. If a clever, kind, gentle-handed 
little girl could get a crumb of bread down their throats, it 
would do no harm; but all rough, violent, clumsy mani¬ 
pulation IS as bad as the throat-tickling of the hard fingered 
hangman. Animal heat will he their greatest restorative. 
At night let them be quietly slipped under their mother; 
the next morning thej' will be either as brisk as the rest, or 
as flat as pancakes and dried biffins.” 
Next comes before us Ornamental, Aquatic, and 
Domestic I’ou'l, and Game Birds, by Mr. J. Nolan, of 
Dublin, long an amateur breeder, and now a merchant 
of the birds concerning which be writes. It is a volume 
containing mncli information, but ill-digested, and con¬ 
taining more information relative to game than to 
domestic fowls. 
Domestic Fowl, their Natural Histori/, Breeding, 
Bearing, Feeding, and General Management, by Mr. 
H. D. Richardson, we have before noticed as a very 
excellent compendium of previously published informa¬ 
tion ; and in its last edition it has been revised by a 
practical farmer. 
Lastly, we have— Fowls: a plain and familiar Treatise 
\ on the principal Breeds —by Mr. John Daily, the well and 
j favourably known pordterer of Mount Street, Grosvenor 
I Stpiare. This little work is a third edition of bis 
j pamphlet on his great pet, “ The Dorking Fowl,” with 
\ the addition of some excellent and useful infoi'mation 
relative to other varieties. IVe have room only for one 
short extract, and no room to enter into a detail of the 
reasons why we differ from some of his opinions. 
“ The real Hambro’ fowl is a beautiful bird. There are 
two sorts, the golden and the silver; they differ in one 
I respect only, the foundation colour of one is white, the 
other yellow; one description will serve for both. They 
have bright red doul)le combs ; clear hackles, either white 
or yellow; bodies spotted or pencilled all over with black; 
taper blue legs, and ample tails. Their carriage is gay and 
proud ; their shape, symmetry, and their appearance is alto¬ 
gether indicative of great cheerfulness, and carrying an air 
of enjoyment, which always prepossesses in their favour. 
“ 'The plumage of the cocks ditl'ers somewhat from the 
hens : they are very little sperdried, if at all, except while 
chickens, when the wings and hinder parts are marked, l)nt 
tliis seldom lasts after the first moult. In the silver variety, 
the cock is almost white, having sometimes a chesnut patch 
on the wing, and towards the tail some black spots, hut 
these disappear as he gets older. The tail is invariably 
black, hut the sickle feathers arc tinged with a redish - 
white, and in the golden cock they are shaded with a rich 
bronze or copper. The cock of the golden is red all over, 
and both have well-defined white deaf ears. 
“ The great virtue and merit of these fowls are, they are 
prodigious layers, and this is not Vjrought about hj any 
undue feeding, but it is their nature. They are said never 
to set, and, as a rule, it is true of them ; not one in a thou¬ 
sand deviates from it; but when I lived in Davies-street, I 
had one at liberty, she stole a nest in a lumber-room, and 
brought out a brood of chickens. _ ■ 
“ They are excellent guards in the country, for when dis- i 
turbed in their roosting-place, they are the noisiest of the j 
noisv, and nothing but death or liberty will induce them tft 
hold" their peace. I think I may say with trutli, they lay 
twice as many eggs as any others. 
“ In these, as in other breeds, erroneous ideas and names 
have crept in, some being correct descriptions of the same 
fowl under another name, hut others being imaginative, so 
far as real Hambro’ fowls are concerned. 
“ The Bolton Bays and Greys, and Chitteprats, are iden¬ 
tical with the Hambro’. I have also seen so-called I'urkisli 
and Creoles, which were the same. 
“ As a general rule, it may he observed, no true-bred 
Hambro’ fowl has top-knot, single comb, white legs, any 
approach to feather on their legs, white tail, or spotted 
hackle. 
“ I know no bird that gains so much by change of climate 
as this does; the British bred are infinitely better than 
the imported." 
In conclusion, we have to observe, that one great 
deficiency more or less detracts from the value of all the 
publications we have passed over rapidly in. review 
they are not original works. They do not place before 
us facts stored up by the authors, or by their friends ; 
but they retail, again and again, what their predecessors 
had borrowed before, and that without sullicient know¬ 
ledge to select ancient truths—always valuable—hut 
republishing them with equally ancient errors. Mr. 
Daily’s volume claims exemption from this condemna¬ 
tion ; hut this very exemption proves the correctness of 
our judgment. Mr. Daily has confined himself chiefly 
to a statement of his personal experience and observa¬ 
tion, and the result is a thin duodecimo of 58 pages. 
We might proceed to remark further upon the great i 
deficiency of knowledge, often mixed up with the 
practice of gross ignorance, relative to the diseases 
of fowls, which are markedly apparent in all the , 
volumes we have enumerated; and added to these 
deficiencies are most imperfect arrangement, and the | 
absence of good facilitators to reference. These defects i 
are very extensively felt, and, combined with the wide, | 
and more widely-growing, attention now paid to poultry, ^ 
they have induced several of the best breeders ot 
poultry to contribute the results of their experience, so 
as to form what we believe will prove to he the most 
trustworthy work on poultry that has hitherto appeared. 
It will be published in five or six cheap and highly- 
illustr.ated numbers, and the first of those numbers will 
appear in January next. 
