502 A. H. STURTEVANT 
ning to appear; wing-bows red and black; coverts and wing-bays 
brown stippled; breasts and tails black. In this connection 
it may be of interest to note what Mr. Henry Hales, breeder 
of Silver Gray Dorkings, says (in a letter dated December 28, 
1911) in regard to the juvenile plumage of males in that breed: 
The males have not the stippling like the females at any age: before 
adult feathering the cockerels have the coloring mixed up with white, 
black, and brown. One would hardly believe they would have the 
decided colors of the full plumage of the cocks. One cannot judge what 
the young ones are going to be until they are fully feathered. 
In view of this statement, it may be that my duckwing male was 
not far enough advanced when killed to show quite the adult 
plumage. Mr. Watson Westfall, another breeder of Silver Gray 
Dorkings, wrote to me, under date of December 29, 1911, giving 
a somewhat different statement, as follows: 
The Silver Gray female was once quite a brown colored hen and the 
males did not have white saddles and hackles but were straw color with 
some red across the shoulders. At this time they were known as Gray 
Dorkings, but by continual selection the English bred this brown out 
of them, and when the saddle, back, and hackle of the male was quite 
free of red and straw color and the female more gray the word Silver 
was added, making the name Silver Gray as we have it now. As the 
chicks hatch now with the very pure white top male as sire all the cock- 
erels show themselves plainly at once by being whiter on the head than 
the pullets, but as soon as they begin to feather they soon become very 
closely alike and remain so until the adult feathers appear, when the 
males will show black on breast while the females will begin to show 
red. Butlike all such varied colored fowls the female gets her real color 
long before the male. At two months old and up until the time the 
adult feathers begin to show on the cockerels they have a lot of stippled 
feathers on wings and back, but not many are as evenly stippled as 
the pullets, and where they are so much stippled and there is no brown at 
all to show on the wings, such specimens are very apt to be splashed with 
white on the breast. The red doesn’t all want to be lost in the chick 
feathers or else there will be failure in breast coloring. 
Specimens representing the grays (one ~ and one @), reds 
(one =~), duckwings (one « and one ¢ ), and extracted browns 
(one ¢) are deposited with the Zoédlogical Laboratory of Colum- 
bia University. 
