Page:Oregon, her history, her great men, her literature.djvu/321



was 303 eggs in her first 12 months of laying. Tliis hen was the result of scientific breeding conducted at the Poultry Department of the College. Experiments with Hen No. C521 demonstrated that it is possible to breed flocks of lowls that will lay an average of 200 eggs a year, notwithstanding the prevalent belief of a few years before that an individual hen laying that number of eggs in a year was a "rara avis"—a fowl that could not reproduce her kind. The science of poultry husbandry, however, has advanced so rapidly that Hen C521 was finally surpassed, but not until her record stimulated nation-wide experiment in poultry industry.

Lady McDufF is not only a champion herself, but she has the greater distinction of producing champions. Large numbers of her descendants have shown phenomenal laying proclivities. In the sixth International Egg Laying Contest at the Connecticut Agricultural College, in competition with the best bred layers in the world, a pen of ten of her grand-daughters beat all other entries, 1 00 in number, and broke the record for a pen of ten in laying contests with an average production of 2 35.2 eggs a hen.

Oregon State Library. The Oregon State Library has been in existence since territorial days. Until the year 1913 it was a law and document library exclusively. In that year the legislature transferred all except the law books to the