FANCIER S’ JOURNAL AND POULTRY EXCHANGE. 
485 
die. They are the prettiest pets vve ever had, bat all our 
love and care are of no avail. People tell us they eat rose- 
bugs, but we think the stock is not old enough. Hope we 
shall have enough left to try again next year. We have 
tried red pepper and black in their food, have given them 
sour milk, and kept it from them, but all to no purpose; the 
dear little things droop and die, and we have no power to 
save. Can any come to our aid ? S. B. S. 
West Amesbury, July 13. 
FEEDING CHICKENS BY MACHINERY. 
It seems to be generally admitted by gourmands that no 
chickens of mechanical fattening have such exquisite flavor 
as those submitted to the process. In the Gardens of Accli- 
mation at Paris, this is very scientifically practiced under 
the direction of M. Odile Martin. “ Its advantages,” say 
the authorities, “ do not consist in the rapidity of the pro- 
cess alone, but above all in the special quality of the meat 
thus produced. It is solid, very tender, exceedingly fine- 
grained, not overfat (which would not be an advantage), 
very white in color, and of a flavor quite exceptionally ex- 
cellent.” 
If this is so, of course there is no help for the chickens. 
They must perforce enter their cpinettes , and be mathemati- 
cally crammed. Behold here the ingenious contrivance of 
the Gardens of Acclimation for manufacturing this “ ex- 
ceptionally excellent ” flavor ! 
It is a huge cylinder with fourteen faces, each in five 
stories of three compartments each. It holds, therefore, 
210 fowls. The cylinder is hollow and empty, except for 
the axis on which it turns. This hollow construction ren- 
ders it easily ventilated and kept clean. Before it is a box 
for the operator. This box, or carriage, moves up and down 
by pulleys. The gaveur— that sounds less offensive than 
crammer — operates thus : Commencing at the bottom of one 
of these fourteen faces, he seizes with the left hand the neck 
of the chicken ; and pressing on each side of the beak, the 
bird is forced to open his mouth, as any lady knows who 
has doctored a sick chicken or canary. The gaveur then 
introduces the metallic end of the rubber tube into the 
throat of the chicken, and by a pressure of the foot on a 
pedal the food rises, and at the same time the amount pass- 
ing through the tube is indicated on a dial in front of the 
operator. 
It is therefore a skilful operation ; for the gaveur , what- 
ever other motions are necessary, must pay strict attention 
to the needle on the dial, or he will give his chicken too 
much or too little. The three chickens duly fed, he turns 
the cylinder on its axes a little, and the next face of it is 
before him. When he has completed the round he turns 
the crank, and the carriage rises to the next story ; and so 
he goes on to the top. Having completed the upper circuit, 
every chicken in that epinette is duly fed. Then he turns 
the crank in the other direction, and the carriage descends 
to the floor, where it rests on a railroad. It is then moved 
along before the next epinette , and the whole operation on 
210 more chickens is repeated. A skilful operator will gave 
or cram, 400 chickens in an hour! That is less than nine 
seconds to each one; for the time to move the cylinder, to 
move the carriage up, down, and to the next epinette , must 
be counted out. 
Under this epinette regime, it requires an average of fif- 
teen days to fatten a duck, eighteen for a chicken, twenty 
for a goose, and twenty-five for a turkey. The feed used for 
chickens is barley and corn meal mixed with milk into a 
dough so thin that no other liquid is necessary. The ordi- 
nary quantity given, is from ten to twenty centilitres, or 
from seven-tenths to one and four-tenths of a gill each time ; 
but this quantity is reached gradually. When the maxi- 
mum that any chicken can assimilate is found, the number 
indicating this quantity is placed before its compartment, 
and the gaveur must measure it exactly on the dial. 
Truly this is an age of wonders. What a labor-saving 
invention this epinette must be to the chickens. May-be it 
is not wise to give these details. What if some enterprising 
American should be thereby tempted to invest his whole 
fortune in a grand improved automaton steam-power epin- 
ette , warranted to feed ten thousand chickens a minute. 
BURNHAM vs. WRIGHT. 1849 ? ’46 ? ’47 ? 
BY GEO. P. BURNHAM. 
“The forms of things unknown , the writer’s pen 
Turns into shape ; and gives to airy nothings 
A local habitation — and a name.” 
— Shakspeare. 
“Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” 
— Davy Crockett. 
(Continued from No. 29.) 
J. M. Wade, Esq. : 
I will now conclude my criticism upon Mr. Lewis Wright’s 
two latest Poultry Books. 
The silly story about “ the ship with the Cornish-Chamber- 
lin fowls on board from the port of Luckipoor, up the Brah- 
mapootra River,” having “ arrived at New York in 1849 ” 
first, and afterwards “in 1846,” was years ago utterly ex- 
ploded. In the first place, Luckipoor is not “a port.” It 
is a small town in the interior, over a hundred miles distant 
from the river banks. There are three places in India (ham- 
lets) similarly named (see Luckimpoor), all far away from 
the Brahmapootra. After the letters of Mr. Cornish ap- 
peared in England, the accomplished editor of the London 
Field thus squelched this nonsense out. He had previously 
said (see Tegetmeier’s elegant Poultry Book, page 55), 
“ There is not a particle of evidence to show that these fowls 
came from India. The banks of the Brahmapootra have 
long been in possession of the British, and no such fowls were 
ever seen in that locality. In fact, they originated not in 
India, but in America.” Then he adds, in the Field, speak- 
ing of Cornish’s letters : 
“A sailor, whose name nobody knows, belonging to a ship 
whose name no one remembers, and having a captain also 
unknown, is stated to have ‘sailed from the port of Lucki- 
poor ’ with these original fowls. It is a pity Mr. Cornish 
did not also forget the name of this port ; for geographical 
truth compels us to state that Luckipoor is not a port at all ! 
but a small inland town in the Himalaya Mountains, one 
hundred miles distant from the nearest point of the Brahma- 
pootra River. Luckipoor is not among the ports mentioned 
in the ‘Sailing Directions of British India;’ and as far as 
we can learn from naturalists and others acquainted with 
that part of the world, no such race of birds is to be found 
there." 
This emphatic clincher, from such authority as W. B. 
Tegetmeier, P.Z.S., is acknowledged all over the world to 
be, might be accepted ordinarily as a finality. Mr. Wright 
shrewdly “ dismisses this subject of Luckipoor,” very sum- 
marily, after reading the above from the Field (see Wright’s 
latest work, p. 243), “ with the simple remark that it is 
scarcely matter for wonder that the name of the ship, cap- 
