il //Of'/i STANDARD A\l) BREED HOOK SI 



the Java of the early period herein alluded to leads a very doubt- 

 ful existence. No definite nor authentic information for a Black 

 Java that was distinct from the Black Cochin of the period be- 

 tween 1850 and 1870 can be found. Coupled with this fact, the 

 absence of a Java in our first standard becomes significant, par- 

 ticularly as the first of these works was published but a decade 

 or so after the original cross that produced the Plymouth Rock 

 was made and so few years after this particular Java was sup- 

 posed to have flourished. 



Well and truly did Stoddard (1880) write: "On Black Java 

 hens, a sort now nearly or quite unknown in this country ;" and 

 this plain admission that the dam of a great race of fowls, then 

 rapidly becoming "if not already more commonly kept than any 

 other race," was nearly if not quite unknown in this country, only 

 eleven years after the race made its first public appearance and 

 no more than fifteen probably after its creation. What could 

 have become of it in the very few years intervening is beyond 

 conception unless, as Mr. Felch has suggested, it was classed as 

 a Cochin by our best standard makers, and if men of their breadth 

 of intelligence, their long experience and reputation in the poul- 

 try world, classed them as Cochins Cochins in reality without 

 doubt they were for men of the calibre of our first standard 

 makers could not be mistaken upon a question of breed charac- 

 teristics certainly not all of them, and with the characteristics 

 involved, those of a breed as commonly kept and understood as 

 the Cochin. 



English Opinions as to Origin. With our own good Ameri- 

 can breeders so feverishly excited and possibly prejudiced either 

 by their friendship for the men involved or by their opinoins of 

 the breeds in question, or not in question, it may be somewhat 

 refreshing to seek the opinions of those who may review the 

 heated question in a cooler atmosphere or at a distance and surely 

 with prejudice wholly removed. All these men had, when their 

 opinions w r ere expressed, made questions of poultry culture the 

 study of rather long lives even then and, although each of them 

 lived for years afterwards, they were not known to advance any 

 opinion differing in any particular from those herein quoted. 



Edward Brown of London, England, whose writings are 

 familiar to many poultryinen in America and whose war-time lec- 

 tures have been so well received recently (1918) in this country, 

 wrote in 1884, under the name of Stephen Beale, in a work en- 

 titled "Profitable Poultry Keeping," page 117: 



