Egg

“ In common parlance, we understand by an egg something of the nature of a hen's egg, a mass of yolk surrounded with white and inclosed in a shell. But to the naturalist, the envelopes of the egg, which vary greatly in different animals, are mere accessories, while the true egg, or, as it is called, the ovarian egg, with which the life of every living being begins, is a minute sphere, uniform in appearance throughout the Animal Kingdom, though its intimate structure is hardly to be reached even with the highest powers of the microscope. ”

“ I entitle conception the first mixture from the male and female (the analogue of the vegetable seed therefore) . Wherefore from one seed there is engendered one body, as from one egg one animal.”
It appears, consequently, that for one egg there is one soul or vital principle. [208] But whether is this that of the mother, or that{277} of the father, or a mixture of the two? And here the greatest difficulties are occasioned by those eggs that are produced by the concurrence of animals of different species, as, for example, of the common fowl and pheasant. ”

“ The hen’s egg.—A hen’s egg bears a somewhat similar relation to the adult bird that the maize or bean seed (Chapter I.) bears to the adult plant; for the egg contains
(1) a speck of living matter which little by little grows and becomes marked off, by orderly arrangement, to form the various regions and organs of the adult animal; and
(2) a store of food, which enables the young chick to develop in security, without being hampered, whilst still weak and helpless, by the necessity of earning its own living. ”

“ Of the growth and generation of the hen’s egg enough has already been said; and we have now to lay before the reader our observations on the procreation of the chick from the egg,—a duty which is equally difficult, and profitable, and pleasant. For in general the first processes of nature lie hid, as it were, in the depths of night, and by reason of their subtlety escape the keenest reason no less than the most piercing eye. ”

“ It is well known that their single egg is of such a tapering form that a gust of wind, instead of sweeping it from the ledge of rock on which it is laid, merely causes it to twist round in a circle with the thin end as centre. ”

“ An egg being eighty per cent. water, consider the effect on eggs produced by the farmers’ flocks, where the water supply is mainly pools in the barn yard, which receive the drainage from the manure piles, and where the principal food supply is scratched out of manure heaps, consisting of undigested grain that has already passed through another animal.
A hen must have a large proportion of animal food to lay well, and to produce rich, nutritious eggs. ”

“ The analogy between seeds and eggs has long been observed, and is confirmed by the mode of their production. The egg is known to be formed within the hen long before its impregnation; C.F. Wolf asserts that the yolk of the egg is nourished by the vessels of the mother, and that it has from those its arterial and venous branches, but that after impregnation these vessels gradually become impervious and obliterated, and that new ones are produced from the fetus and dispersed into the yolk. ”

“ The yolk of the egg is a still stronger or more nutritive fluid, which is drawn up into the bowels of the chick just at its exclusion from the shell, and serves it for nourishment for a day or two, till it is able to digest, and has learnt to choose the harder seeds or grains, which are to afford it sustenance. ”

“ We see, therefore, that the development of the chick and the mammal is the same, while the difference between their eggs is not an essential one,—the nutriment for the mammalian egg being furnished from time to time, while that for the bird's egg is supplied at once in the form of yolk. A homely illustration of this difference is that of a man who receives his yearly food from day to day, and of one who receives his yearly food at once. ”

“ But the egg itself must be considered as the original animal, as the infusorial creature, appearing in the globular or primary form of animal life, and, like the seed of the plant, containing ideally within itself the whole animal, which, under given external circumstances, it develops really out of itself. Recent observations have shown that the first rudiment of the embryo is formed on the inner surface of the hollow globe of the egg, by folding or turning inwardly a part of the integuments of the egg ”

“ After an egg is laid, the liquid which it contains begins to evaporate through the pores of the shell and, as this continues, a noticeable space is left inside. [111]
(1) Shake the egg, holding it near the ear. If the contents rattle, it is somewhat stale.
(2) Drop the egg in cold water. If it sinks, it is fresh.
(3) Hold the egg between your eye and the light. If clear, it is fresh.
(4) A rough appearance of the shell denotes freshness.
2. Out of the shell:
White—this should be clear and cling to the yolk. ”

“ The old hen had been there again and laid another while they were gone. The second little girl claimed that egg, of course, and she painted it a bright yellow with buttercup juice. Then the next day there was another egg, and the next day there was another egg, and the next day there was another egg, until there was one apiece for every one of the children, and some over. ”

“ Any egg can be thrown out of a first-floor window on to the lawn without the shell breaking, it falls like a cat, right end upwards, and this is not a boiled egg, either! You can tell that because it will not spin on the table, so it must have been a raw egg. A cooked egg would spin. ”

“ A good-sized egg will weigh 1,000 grains, of which about 107 are shell, 604 are white, and 289 are yolk. Of the shell, 97 per cent. is carbonate of lime, 1 per cent. phosphate of lime and magnesia, and 2 per cent. albumen. The white consists of 12 per cent. of albumen, 2.7 of mucus, 0.3 of salts, and 85 of water. The yolk has about 17.4 per cent. of albumen, 28.6 of yellow oil, 54 of water, with a trace of sulphur and phosphorus.
The foregoing are the constituents of eggs, which have been formed when the bird has free access to the various articles which constitute her natural food. ”

“ And just as in an egg there exists the force to generate the chicken and the material of its nutriment up to the time when it reaches perfection and emerges from the egg, and the female lays the egg in a short space of time ”

“ The largest eggs are those of birds; and this because, to the minute essential portion of the egg, or germ, from which the young bird grows, there is added a large store of food-material—the yolk and white of the egg—destined to nourish the growing embryo while the whole is enclosed within a hard shell. ”

“ The King shuddered as he said "eggs," and Kaliko also shuddered, and so did the Long-Eared Hearer; for eggs are the only things that the nomes greatly dread. The reason for this is that eggs belong on the earth's surface, where birds and fowl of all sorts live, and there is something about a hen's egg, especially, that fills a nome with horror. ”

“ In thus saying that the ova of all animals are, so far as microscopes can reveal, substantially similar, I am of course speaking of the egg-cell proper, and not of what is popularly known as the egg. The egg of a bird, for example, is the egg-cell, plus an enormous aggregation of nutritive material, an egg-shell, and sundry other structures suited to the subsequent development of the egg-cell when separated from the parent’s body. ”

“ It will require the aid of a microscope to discover and observe the object of our search and study. The egg of the bird bears some proportion to the size of its producer, for in them is stored up the nourishment which is to maintain the unfolding life that can be fed in no other way until it has reached an advanced stage of maturity, and has broken its shell and emerged into the outer world. The human egg is so small that it would require two hundred and forty of them laid side by side to make one inch in length. ”

“ EGGS.—To prove whether they are good or bad, hold the large end of the egg to your tongue; if it feels warm, it is new; but if cold, it is bad. In proportion to the heat or cold, is the goodness of the egg. Another way to know is to put the egg in a pan of cold water; the fresher the egg, the sooner it will fall to the bottom; if rotten, it will swim. ”

“ In such a case, the egg itself divides into a number of portions: two, four, eight, or even twelve and sixteen individuals being normally developed from every egg, in consequence of this singular process of segmentation of the yolk,—which takes place, indeed, in all eggs, but in those which produce but one individual is only a stage in the natural growth of the yolk during its transformation into a young embryo. ”

“ As soon as the eggs are in the water, let the latter simmer. The egg is poached when the white has enveloped the yolk, reassuming, as it were, the form of a raw egg, and when it may be touched without breaking. ”

“ I lay something near a hundred eggs at a time and four times in a season. In just fourteen days after an egg is laid it is hatched, eats, grows, makes a cradle, comes out and is a full-grown fly ready to lay eggs itself. ”

“ Since an egg is an undeveloped chick that requires only the addition of warmth to develop it into a living, moving creature made of muscles, bones, and blood, it is evident that this food contains considerable tissue-building and energy-producing material. The exact proportion of this material, as well as the other substances found in eggs, is given in the food chart shown in Essentials of Cookery, Part 1. ”

“ The chick in the egg is first nourished by the white, and when that is consumed, by the yolk.—A short time before the exclusion of the animal, the whole of the yolk is taken into its abdomen, and the shell, at the obtuse end, frequently appears cracked, winch is occasioned by the instinctive operation of the beak.
Eggs vary much in their colour, size, and form, according to the birds that deposit them, and the different modes of dressing them. Those chiefly used for culinary purposes are the new laid eggs of hens, being without exception the most wholesome. ”

“ Each puts one egg to roast, and when her egg begins to sweat (it will sweat blood) , she is to rise and turn it. At this time the one whom that projector is to marry will come in through a door or window (all of which must be left open throughout) and take her vacant chair. If she is to die before she marries, two black dogs will enter, bearing a coffin, which they will deposit on her chair.
Quaker Neck, Kent Co., Md.
228. Boil an egg hard, take out the yolk, and fill its place with salt. Eat it before going to bed. The one you dream of as bringing you water is your future husband. ”

“ The protoplasm of all eggs contains nutritive material for the nourishment of the future embryo, and this material may be sufficient in quantity to make the whole cell, although remaining microscopic, conspicuously large, or to expand it to the relatively enormous mass of the yellow yolk of a fowl's egg. ”

“ A type of egg not uncommon is heavily and evenly marked all over with fine dots and larger spots of reddish-brown.371 Judging from the material at hand I should say that there is a characteristic type of marking running through the eggs of the species if we except the two extremes, viz., those almost unspotted, and those so entirely covered with heavy blotches that they appear to be of a uniform chocolate color. ”

“ The hen's egg is large, because there is a large quantity of food-yolk stored up for the use of the growing chick; the frog's egg is smaller, because it contains less yolk; and some eggs—for example, those of starfishes—are smaller than pin-heads. ”

“ In choosing eggs, hold them up against the light, and if you see that the yolk is round, and the white thin and clear, you may suppose them to be good. But if the yolk appears to be broken and mixed with the white, giving it a thick cloudy look, you may be sure that the egg is bad. Eggs may be preserved by keeping them in a keg of lime-water, or by greasing each egg all over with dripping, and putting them into a tight vessel filled with wood-ashes, placing them all with their small ends downwards. ”

“ The white of the egg consists of two parts, each of which is enveloped in distinct membranes. The outer bag of albumen, next the shell, is quite a thin, watery body, while the next, which invests the yolk, is heavy and thick. But few housekeepers who break eggs ever distinguish between the two whites, or know of their existence even. Each has its appropriate office to fulfill during the process of incubation or hatching, and one acts, in the mysterious process, as important a part as the other. ”

“ Eggs when laid vary considerably in size, but otherwise are a very uniform product. The purpose of the egg in nature requires that this be the case, because the contents of the egg must be so proportioned as to form the chick without surplus or waste, and this demands a very constant chemical composition. ”

“ Thus, an egg they would take to be in reality a white, brittle, hard thing on the outside, having a certain shape, size, and weight, and containing inside the shell a quantity of soft whitish and yellowish substance with a given taste. ”

“ All this time a great change has been going on in the whole interior of the egg; the chick has, of course greatly increased, and the red veins have become more numerous, and spread over the entire surface; the yolk is scarcely distinguishable from the other portions. ”

“ Most persons are familiar with the appearance of eggs, but in order that satisfactory results may be obtained in their selection, care, and cooking, it will be necessary to look into the details of their composition. As is well known, an egg consists of a porous shell lined with a fine, but tough, membrane that encloses the white and the yolk and serves to protect them. The yolk is divided from the white by a delicate membrane, which permits it to be separated from the white when an egg is carefully broken. ”