PLYMOUTH ROCK STANDARD AND BREED BOOK 163 



"The Dominique presents the same characteristics in fact, 

 the Plymouth Rock inherits this peculiarity, with its color, from 

 the Dominique, and wherever you find the Dominique color, 

 in Leghorns or anywhere else, you find the same law to govern. 

 The observation of this law will be taken up in the chapter 

 on breeding, so that I shall not follow it further at this time, but 

 just here I will say that the fact must be accepted a.s a law and 

 not regarded as a mere eccentricity. The color difference be- 

 tween the male and the female is really much less in the Dom- 

 inique color than in many others. As soon as you get outside 

 of the solid colors as white and black the utmost diversity 

 is manifested. The tyro refuses to credit the statement that the 

 Partridge Cochin cock and hen are of the same breed. The 

 Dark Brahma shows as wide a difference between sexes, and 

 what could be more unlike than the cocks and hens of the 

 various Games and Pheasants, all the way to the songbirds as 

 gaily light as the butterflies themselves ? 



"The law of variation between male and female is Nature's 

 law, and not an eccentricity confined to this particular breed 

 of fowls." 



H. H. Stoddard, for years editor and publisher of the 

 Poultry World, of Hartford, Conn., has written so interestingly 

 on this topic of the difference in male and female color that we 

 quote from his work, "The Plymouth Rocks," of 1880 : 



"Yet it may be doubted whether we ever can produce 

 Plymouth Rocks that shall tend, invariably, to produce males as 

 dark as the females, and females as light as the males. The old 

 Black Java hen has been made too much of a scapegoat. There 

 are, no doubt, instances in the animal kingdom where traits 

 originally introduced through one sex tend to persist in that 

 sex alone. But experiments in mating a Black Cochin cock 

 to an average American Dominique hen and rearing the prod- 

 ucts of the cross for three generations have proved that the 

 dark pigment still appeared chiefly in the pullets rather than in 

 the cockerels. This might have been expected in advance, be- 

 cause analogy teaches it. Nearly all our breeds whose plum- 

 age contains both light and dark feathers, or markings, nat- 

 urally throw males whose color will average lighter than that 

 of the females. The hackle and saddle of the cock incline to 

 be lighter than the corresponding portions of the hen and 

 certain portions of his tail and wings contain relatively larger 

 patches of white, which make his average color higher than 



