CAIRO TO KISUMU There is a hatchery near the Pyramids where the farmers trade fresh eggs for young chicks at two eggs per chick, and there is another, farther down the Nile valley, which produces a half million little chickens every season. It is estimated that the oven crop of chickens amounts to thirty or forty millions a year, that number of little fowls being sold by the incubator owners when the baby chicks are about able to walk.

Most of our incubators are of metal and many are kept warm by oil lamps. Those used here are one-story build¬ ings made of sun-dried bricks. They contain ovens which are fired during the hatching seasons. The eggs are laid upon cut straw in racks near the oven, and the firing is so carefully done that the temperature is kept just right from week to week. The heat is not gauged by the thermo¬ meter, but by the judgment and experience of the man who runs the establishment. A fire is started eight or ten days before the eggs are put in, and from that time on it is not allowed to go out until the hatching season is over. The eggs are turned four times a day while hatching. Such establishments are cheaply built, and so arranged that it costs almost nothing to run them. One that will hatch two hundred thousand chickens a year can be built for less than fifty dollars, while for about a dollar and a half per day an experienced man can be hired to tend the fires, turn the eggs, and sell the chickens.

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