ceeded in maintaining a higher temperature in the poultry houses than is usually found in out buildings for live stock. They have protected the fowls from the extremes of winter weather.

But the temperature is only a part of spring conditions. In spring and summer fowls have, with the higher tempera

tures, abundance of air in the houses, and live much out doors. The out-door temperature and the temperature inside the house are not much different. In the house it is cooler on a very warm day and warmer on a cool day, but the difference would rarely exceed eight or ten degrees either way.

In winter, if the house is to be kept at a much higher temperature compared with the out-door atmosphere than at other seasons, the house must be shut up, and there must be no free and rapid circulation of air between the exterior and interior, except when the out-door temperature is high; for free circulation of air when the outer temperature is low will reduce the temperature in the house to within eight or ten degrees of the outside temperature, and if the outside temperature is zero, or ten, twenty or more degrees below, this makes the inside colder than, on the theory that the house should be kept warm, is advisable.

temperature, or must be heated artificially.

many times, but generally discarded as unsatisfactory, and Artificial heating in houses for laying stock has been tried

kept shut so close that the heat from the fowls keeps up the

quired by this theory of housing, the house must either be To keep the temperature in the house up as high as re

PLAN OF POULTRY HOUSE USED IN J. H. ROBINSON'S FIRST COLD HOUSE EXPERIMENT. This building consists of two parts,-a two-
pen house 12 feet wide by 28 feet long, and a two-story part 12 feet square, with small pens on ground floor and room for pigeons, storage
or other special use overhead. The low part is 6 feet high at the eaves, the other 12 feet. A, ground plan of house; DD, outside doors;
dd, inside doors; ww, windows; rr, roosts; s, stair; B, outline of frame work of rear wall; C, outline of frame of front wall; the dotted
lines indicate the position of the windows; D, outline of frame of west end; E, outline of frame of east end; F, an inside partition between
pens; G, framing of west end at corner post; H, framing of back at corner post; I, framing of posts and sills at corner; J, method of roof
construction at peak, explained in the text.

not giving returns to justify the expense.

In central New York some of the large egg farmers who use S. C. White Leghorns to produce eggs for the New York city market keep stoves in their houses, but I know of nowhere else where it is generally done.

When a house is kept shut close enough to keep the temperature up by the heat from the fowls, proper ventilation becomes at times impossible. Under some conditions the house cannot be kept warm with the heat from this source, and at the same time the air in it renewed as often as it should be. When only the nights are cold, or occasionally there is a day so cool that it is thought best to keep the house shut up, no serious bad results develop. But when there are several days of continued cold weather, with the houses shut all the time, conditions inside the houses begin to be bad; and if-as sometimes happens-cold and stormy weather is prolonged for a week or more, conditions in the poultry house become very bad, the walls and under side of the roof drip with moisture, and the air becomes bad. Under such conditions roup often develops and becomes epidemic; or, where no virulent disease appears, the fowls are catarrhal, debilitated and unproductive.

It is often said that roup and kindred diseases were rare in old times, when most of the stock in the country was mongrel or old barnyard stock, and when all the attention the average poultryman gave to selection for breeding was to swap roosters every year; and many attribute the trouble to in-breeding, and to a greater liability to disease in thoroughbred fowls. I think it is due more to other causes, and as much to tight, badly ventilated houses as to any other cause, or perhaps to all other causes combined. Certain it is that in a great many instances in the last few years opening up the poultry houses and giving the fowls pure air in abundance by night as well as by day has been followed by a marked improvement in the general health of the flock.

My own experimenting with cold and open houses was undertaken to show what was possible under conditions quite the opposite of those generally recommended as necessary

to good egg production and healthy stock in winter. I was constantly receiving inquiries from poultrymen having trouble with damp houses as to how to remedy that condition; and, as I visited poultry plants in winter, I almost always found the houses damp, badly ventilated, and overheated about midday even of quite cold days.

I think that in most cases conditions need not have been bad had the poultrymen used ordinary judgment in opening doors and windows. The common practice was to keep houses closed in winter except on very bright, warm days, and then open them either only for a little while in the middle of the day, or open them toward midday and leave them open until dark. Very often it would happen that houses were kept closed tight all day on a bright day, when the sun shone warm during the middle of the day and made the poultry house as warm as a green-house. Frequently the poultryman kept doors and windows shut nearly all the time, relying upon his ventilators to supply fresh air. That the ventilation did not work as theoretically as it was supposed to work was generally plain to any one who stepped into the house, except the owner. Where the intention was to ventilate by means of doors and windows, opening the house up gradually in the morning and gradually closing it in the afternoon, the system rarely operated as planned. Such a plan, if faithfully put in practice, works well except for long-continued cold weather, when the short time the house may be opened is not long enough to thoroughly air and dry it; but I have seen very few plants on which this plan of ventilation was operated as it should be. On most plants it is attended to very irregularly, and often neglected for days while the poultryman's time is taken up with matters which seem of more pressing importance. Such a system of ventilating requires more time and attention than many poultrymen are able to give it; hence, is not for them a satisfactory system.

There was no guess-work or theory about my opinion that most poultry keepers would not give the ventilation of tight houses the attention necessary to make them satisfactory. Almost everywhere I went in winter I saw it, and found

also that the worse conditions became in tight houses, the more afraid were the owners to let the air into them.

Various ways of preventing dampness in a tight house have been devised. Thick walls, double or triple, with air spaces or linings between, will not frost inside in cold weather as the single walls do. Some poultrymen make a loft of the space under the roof above the plates, and fill or partly fill it with hay or straw, which will absorb the moisture and keep the room dry.

Such devices, however, do not solve the problem of fresh air. It is practically impossible to keep a poultry house shut up so that the heat from the hens will keep it warm, and at the same time have the air in it renewed as it should be. If the building is large in proportion to the number of fowls kept in it, the heat from them has no appreciable effect on the temperature of it. If it is small enough to be kept warm by as many fowls as its floor space will accommodate, the air in it soon becomes vitiated. As I had occasion to look at the subjects of warmth and ventilation in the light of the experience of many different people, I began to think perhaps the prevailing ideas on those matters were not correct, and to ask myself whether it were not possible to get better conditions and satisfactory results in houses of a different kind.

To this question I found an answer that satisfied me in the large number of instances I could collect from memory, where as good results had been obtained in cold, poorly built houses as the average results in warm houses, and in the few instances where exceptionally good results had been obtained under conditions that we had been accustomed to regard as very bad. Such occurrences had, of course, been considered in the forming of the general authoritative opinion as to the requirements of winter poultry keeping, but were usually considered as exceptions that proved the rule, — a very convenient way of getting around facts that do not accord with theories.

But, however convincing the evidence a man may gather in this way may be to himself, it has not much weight with others; so, instead of publishing the results of my thoughts,