1906.] DEVELOPMENT OF POULTRY. I5I 



of the Others, so that they had to call it Rex, in order to get a 

 name superior to those which they have already described. 



We might accept the theory that the Jungle Fowl of India 

 was the ancestor of all our games and game bantams, but I 

 would ask the scientist and the naturalist, and I would appeal 

 to you if you can believe that the mammoth fowls of China, 

 the Shanghai, the Brahma, and Cochin could have descended 

 from those little miniature birds known as the Jungle Fowl. 

 I think that other sources must be looked for beyond all this 

 to tell us the truth of whence they came. Perhaps I have been 

 led a little astray from the pathway of the naturalist, from the 

 fact that a friend of mine visited China some twenty years ago, 

 in company with a good Catholic father, who was in a position 

 to have great insight into the buildings and homes of the Chi- 

 nese people of a class much like our Jesuits here. They call 

 them their retreats. In these retreats are a lot of people and 

 their descendants who have lived there for ages on the bor- 

 ders of the Chinese Empire. These people have records which 

 this old father of the church found out, went so far back be- 

 yond anything that he knew of, or that was recorded in the 

 Bible, or by the church, that he said he was afraid that if it 

 became published to the world it might upset the Christian 

 religion. In these records, the part that I was interested in, 

 and my friend as well, was recorded the fact that four thousand 

 years at least before the beginning of the Christian era, these 

 people had these retreats ; and kept some of the large sizes of 

 Chinese poultry. The record shows that they had been culti- 

 vated, and that the hatching of such fowls had been in prac- 

 tice. The eggs from such poultry had been sold, and the 

 young chicks hatched and sold four thousand years before the 

 Christian era. In our own Bible we have it recorded that when 

 that Good Man upon earth was deserted by his nearest friends 

 the cock crew thrice. If there had not been some such variety 

 of fowls at that time they would not have been domesticated 

 so as to have been near enough to the pathway of the Master 

 to have crowed so early in the morning. Some thirty-five 

 years after the crucifixion, three separate varieties are men- 

 tioned in Roman history. In Pompeii they dug up a flagon, 

 on one side of which was engraved a beautiful game cock, and 

 on the other was a pea fowl, showing that these two were 

 known in their beauty and elegance. Now with all this in- 



