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the Brighton and Hove Natural History and Philosophical 
Society to listen to a lecture on the domestic mangle as upon the 
domestic fowl. The fowl is so very suburban and back-yardian, 
unhappily for those who live in the suburbs and next to those 
back yards. But it did not take Mr. Foxall long to convince 
his hearers that in the study of the domestic fowl there is an 
enormous amount of natural history and quite a considerable 
amount of philosophy. The fowl, so one gathered from Mr. 
Foxall, is one of those things that man has decided Nature could 
not create properly by herself, and man has set himself to assist 
Nature in making fowls as he considers fowls ought to be made. 
The fowl is wonderfully docile to this sort of treatment. A 
dozen years of judicious assistance to Nature will often evolve 
an entirely new species of fowl, not a mongrel, but a pure- 
blooded variety that will go on breeding its own kind. But, 
alas, Mr. Foxall had to confess that the breeder’s successes in the 
eternal war with Nature which constitutes the fowl breeder’s 
life are only temporary. Nature is too strong for man, and she 
wins in the end. He was convinced that all these new breeds 
were doomed to what was a comparatively quick extinction, and 
that Nature would pursue her undisturbed course, creating fowls, 
of the half-dozen elementary types that she bred in the Indian 
jungles when the natives of Great Britain demanded no other 
clothing but a coat of blue paint. 
At present, however, man finds it a highly interesting and 
lucrative operation inventing new breeds of fowls. He decides 
that one class of fowl would look much better if it resembled a 
swan, and he matches birds of long necks, until at length a bird 
is produced that seems trying to emulate a giraffe. Unhappily, 
if these elongated creatures are left to themselves, they speedily 
revert to their original short necked type. Or else man, with an 
eye to his dinner, sets himself to enlarge the plump, meaty 
breast, or extend the length of the back. An artist will seek to 
develope feathers in some particular position, on the head, for 
instance, till he gets his fowl to resemble a chrysanthemum. 
He will provide special ‘‘moustache cups’”’ for those curled 
darlings, so that, in drinking. they should not get their fine 
feathers or heavy beards put out of curl. If he is very fastidious, 
he will eschew all fowls that erect their tails above an angle of 
sixty degrees, and mate together only those birds who earry their 
tails at the more graceful angle of forty-five degrees. And so on 
and so on, through all kinds of variations, Mr. Foxall showed 
that he was familiar with all the intricate branches of the 
subject, and, what is more, he gave the Society some useful tips 
in breeding. But he advised the man who did not thoroughly 
understand the subject to shun fowl-farming like the plague. 
One point where man can improve on nature much to man’s 
advantage was told by Mr. Foxall to a grateful audience. That 
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