“It is usually possible,” said a chicken farmer, “to tell from an egg’s look whether it will hatch out a rooster or a hen. The egg that will hatch out a hen is, you see, quite smooth at both ends. The one that will give a rooster is wrinkled at the point. Sometimes this rule fails, but as a general thing it holds good.

Twelve inch cakes of ice of excellent quantity are being harvested at Randolph, where the first ice cutting operations on the Kennebec river were begun. The fields at the other Kennebec houses are not in readiness. At dark tonight the thermometer registered 40 degrees above, there was a fog and a light mist. Under such conditions the thickness of the ice is decreasing and the work of grooving is hazardous.

50 Years Ago, 1956

A large poultry house containing 1,600 eight-week-old broilers was destroyed by fire shortly after 10 p.m. The Gravel and Pelletier poultry house, located at the rear of the home of Mr. Phelime P. Gravel on Stetson Road, was in flames when the fire was discovered by members of the Gravel family.

Standard Oil Co. (N.J.) staked 1¼ billion dollars on a continued worldwide boom in oil. That’s the amount the big company will spend improving its facilities and searching for oil and natural gas next year.

25 Years Ago, 1981

A new machine recently installed in St. Mary’s General Hospital’s maternity ward, is expected to help doctors avoid performing many “unnecessary” Caesarean sections. The device, called a fetal scalp sampler, enables doctors to swiftly and accurately determine the acidity of a baby’s blood during the mother’s labor, a critical factor in determining whether or not to perform the Caesarean operation.

A Massachusetts school teacher whose Fallopian tubes had been removed gave birth to America’s first test-tube baby, a healthy 5-pound, 12-ounce girl named Elizabeth Jordan Carr.