Our Domestic Birds: Elementary Lessons in AvicultureRobinson, John H. (John Henry)
Science
Our Domestic Birds: Elementary Lessons in Aviculture
Robinson, John H. (John Henry)
Cage birds; Pigeons; Poultry
After Réaumur many others experimented with artificial hatching. Some of
the ideas were obviously more impractical than those of Réaumur, but the
experimenters tried them out and sometimes succeeded in hatching
chickens by very peculiar and laborious processes. One man in England,
in the latter part of the eighteenth century, hatched some chickens from
eggs placed in cotton batting in a sieve adjusted over a charcoal fire
in a small fireplace. The fire was watched constantly for three weeks,
either by himself or by some member of his family. He demonstrated that
eggs could be hatched in this way, but not that it could be done
profitably. Practical incubators were not produced until about forty
years ago.
Although incubators and brooders have been brought to a relatively high
state of efficiency, they are far from perfect. Inventors of the best
machines are still studying ways to improve them. In this and many other
fields there are opportunities for inventive genius.
=Education and investigation.= Lectures on poultry have been given
occasionally at agricultural institutes in the United States since about
1860. After 1890 the demand for such lectures, and the number given,
constantly increased, and ability to speak in public became valuable to
one versed in aviculture. Then the study of poultry culture was
introduced into agricultural colleges, and a new field was opened to
poultry keepers with a faculty for teaching, and for trained teachers
with special knowledge of domestic birds. The teaching of poultry
culture impressed upon those engaged in it the need of scientific
investigation of many problems not clearly understood even by the
best-informed poultrymen.
The agricultural experiment stations had been giving little attention to
some of these problems except in a desultory way and without important
results. As the demands for more accurate information on many topics
increased, many of the experiment stations began to make important
poultry investigations. For this work men specially trained in various
sciences were required. As a rule the men that were secured for such
work knew very little about poultry when they began their
investigations, but it was much easier for them to acquire a knowledge
of poultry sufficient for their needs than for persons who had poultry
knowledge and no scientific training to qualify for positions as
investigators. The field of investigation of matters relating to poultry
is constantly being extended. Proficiency in physics, chemistry,
biology, surgery, and medicine, and in higher mathematics as far as it
relates to the problems of any of the sciences mentioned, will always be
in demand for scientific work in aviculture. In the future the most
efficient teachers and investigators will be those whose early
familiarity with domestic birds has given a greater insight into the
subject than is usually possessed by those who take up the study of the
subject comparatively late in life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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