Professor Gowell is the author of the following statement:  “The small chicken grower is earnestly urged to use an incubator for hatching.”  This opinion is not in accord with that of the majority of breeders and the more progressive experiment station workers.  The opinion has been expressed by Professor Graham and others, that the particular results at the Maine Station may have been due to the decrease of vitality caused by continued artificial hatching.  This view may be wholly without foundation.  Nevertheless, as the common type of incubator is under heavy criticism, and it is pretty well proven that chicks so hatched have not the vitality of naturally hatched chicks, surely a series of breeding experiments would carry more weight if the replenishing of the flock had been accomplished by natural means.

For the first few years of the breeding work the house used was the old-fashioned double walled and warmed pattern.  The last few years of this work were conducted in curtain front houses.  That the cool house is an improvement over the warm house is generally conceded, but there are many poultrymen who are still of the opinion that the warm house will give a larger egg yield, though at a greater expense and less profit.

In the early years of the work the method of feeding was also a time-honored one, and included a warm mash.  About the middle of the experimental period Professor Gowell brought out the system of feeding dry mash from hoppers.  This custom became a great fad and Professor Gowell and Director Woods have preached it far and wide.  Perhaps it is an improvement, but it is to-day much more popular with novices than with established egg farms.  Many old line poultrymen have tried dry mash only to go back to wet mash, by which method the hens can be induced to eat more which is conducive to high egg yields.  Whether these changes in housing and feeding have been improvements as claimed by those who introduced them, or whether their popularity may be explained in part at least by the psychology of fads, is a point in question, but certainly the marring of a breeding experiment by introducing radical changes in the factors of production is at best unfortunate.

A much more serious criticism than any of the foregoing is to be found in a change of the size of flocks and amount of floor space per fowl.  I have gone over carefully the published records of Professor Gowell, and the review of Dr. Pearl, and the following table represents, as near as I can determine, these factors for the series of years.  In the year 1903 I find no clear statement as to the manner in which the birds were housed, and I may be in error in this case.  Otherwise the table gives the facts.