PART FOURTH. 



WHITE WYANDOTTES, 



ORIGIN AND HISTORY. 



There seems to be a well-founded opinion among poultrymen, 

 that the White Wyandotte is taking the lead of its cousins. With 

 the White Plymouth Rock starting in the race for popular favor, the 

 friends of each variety having boomed and lauded them to the 

 skies, the demand even exceeded the number of breeding fowls, 

 and created a desire in some to take advantage of the demand, and 

 cross Rose-Comb White Leghorns, White Dorkings, etc., on the 

 Silvers, and, in some cases, on White Plymouth Rocks. This un- 

 scrupulous and dishonorable means of putting in the market 

 mongrels and spurious White Wyandottes, had a very bad effect, 

 and would have blasted the hopes of many, had not some honest 

 and enthusiastic breeders come to the rescue, and urged the forma- 

 tion of a White Wyandotte club, and, at the same time, condemned 

 those who were taking dishonest measures in the manipulation of 

 this meritorious variety, which was able to stand on its own merits, 

 when purely bred. 



The White Wyandotte is rapidly approaching reliability in the 

 hands of experienced breeders; as near the ideal type and general 

 comeliness of a Wyandotte, as we could reasonably expect of a new 

 variety, while, at the same time, there are a number of breeders who 

 have poor specimens coming into the world with each brood living 

 witnesses of their impurity. We think this is mainly due to undue 

 haste, in buying up from different yards new strains, in order to have 

 several breeding-pens at once to fill the demands and secure the prices 

 five to eight dollars a setting and the anxiety of many to produce 

 strains of their own, with, perhaps, only one bird of the variety to 

 start with, disseminating through the country a miserable lot of 



