"The Final Say: The Hen and the Golden Eggs" by Monty Gilmer

The following poem, titled "The Hen and the Golden Eggs" (1912), is a fable that William Ellery Leonard adapted from Aesop:

A cottager and wife possessed a Hen

Who laid each day a golden Egg again;

So each one thought that in its fair inside

A lump of gold there surely must abide.

And thus they killed it in the hope of gain,

And found no more than entrails, quite as plain

As fill the insides of all mortal chicks.

The foolish pair were in a silly fix.

And thus 'tis ever with the Get-rich-quicks.

The following quotation is an observation that Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal on October 9, 1860:

This haste to kill a bird or quadruped and make a skeleton of it, which many young men and some old ones exhibit, reminds me of the fable of the man who killed the hen that laid golden eggs, and so got no more gold. It is a perfectly parallel case. Such is the knowledge which you may get from the anatomy as compared with the knowledge you get from the living creature.