94 [Senate 



REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON POULTRY. 



The committee appointed by the Executive Committee to the high 

 and exalted station of sitting in judgment on the merits and demerits 

 of poultry, would beg leave to submit the following report : It was not 

 not without great reluctance that we consented to act in the highly 

 responsible station in which your partiality placed us. Our own lack of 

 just discrimination in the important questions suggested to us in the wide 

 field which a consideration of the subjects threw open to us — ^being an 

 investigation either directly or indirectly of an important branch of the 

 ainmal kingdom, known as bipeds^ made us shrink from the task as 

 one of no ordinary magnitude ; for, if ancient philosophy be true, the 

 very lords of creation might come before us for examination and 

 righteous judgment. 



It was an axiom of the divine Plato that human beings were nothing 

 more than featherless fowls ; which axiom, we have classic authority 

 for saying, was very fully illustrated, if not fairly demonstrated, by 

 one of his pupils plucking a tall rooster and exhibiting him as Platoh 

 man. It is within the recollection of the chairman, that it was once 

 gravely mooted in a court of ancient Plymouth, by two gentlemen 

 learned in the law, before an august judge of the common pleas, 

 whether " Hins were essential to civilization, or civilization essential 

 to hins,^^ and as is usual with that profession, on such momentous 

 questions, involving the great first principles of association as well as 

 civil polity — such were the floods of darkness poured out on the 

 occasion that the question has remained enveloped in a learned fog 

 ever since. 



Your committee, during the discharge of their onerous duties, felt 

 very seriously the difficulties to which the non-settlement of these 

 principles subjected them. They felt that they were left wholly to the 

 lights of nature and of reason to guide them in the important decisions 

 they were required to make. 



They also feel that an apology is due, not only to the society, but 

 to the world at large, for venturing to make a report with no other 

 help than what such lights, aided by what little common sense they 

 chanced to bring with them in a hurried departure from home, afforded. 



They know it is not usual, but for this departure from common 

 custom they trust the well known clemency and urbanity of the 

 executive will pardon them. 



Leaving, therefore, the actual settlement of the above question to the 

 legal and logical acumen of some future Jeremy Bentham, we will. 

 venture to state a few things in the premises that are self-evident. 



" Hins, " if not the essential basis of civilized society, are a large 

 ingredient of it. If not the prototypes they must be rather more than 

 the shadow — for they certainly have their correspondences in the grand 

 family of man with which they are so immediately and intimately 

 connected — from the poor, despised, down-trodden, abject, henpecked 

 husband^ up to the political Chapmans of every class and grade of 

 politicians who crow long and loud and lustily over the temporary 

 triumphs of their party. Our time will not permit us to speculate 



