194 AMERICAN POULTRY ASSOCIATION 



upon the supposition that they had been bred into one strain, at 

 least, of Barred Plymouth Rocks. 



Edward Brown's Explanation. Still another and quite rea- 

 sonable explanation is that offered by Edward Brown in "Races 

 of Domestic Poultry," page 153, as follows: 



"This breed is a sport from the Barred variety. It is easily 

 seen that a failure of pigments, so far as the black marks are 

 concerned, would yield white plumaged fowls, and wherever we 

 have the mixed markings, which is sometimes known by the 

 term "cuckoo" there will occasionally be specimens which either 

 show pure white on the one hand, or are entirely black. It is in 

 this way that many of the varieties have been secured, and the 

 tendency to variation is very great in every kind of poultry." 



D. A. Upham's Statement. The following facts would sub- 

 stantiate Mr. Brown's explanation. As first bred, Plymouth 

 Rocks came with the males very light and females very dark in 

 color. We have Mr. Upham's statement that most of the pullets 

 of the Spaulding cross were black and all the cockerels grey, 

 but that he succeeded in finding a certain number of grey pullets 

 to go with a grey cockerel he selected. 



Rev. D. D. Bishop in his book, "The Development of the 

 Plymouth Rock," calls attention to the light males and darker 

 females as "the law of Dominique color" and makes this state- 

 ment : 



"The most important and striking characteristic that pre- 

 sents itself to a student of Plymouth Rocks is the peculiar dif- 

 ference in the color effect in the two sexes. First, last and 

 always the males come lighter than the females. It is a thing 

 we must never forget in dealing with this breed. It will beat 

 us if we do but we shall never beat that. It is in the birds, it is 

 the law of this color that the males will not only be several 

 shades lighter in color, but the width of the bars wi 1 ! be about 

 one-third of the light spaces between them. It is a very light 

 pullet that has the space between the bars equal in width to the 

 bars themselves, and from that the spaces grow less all the way 

 down to no space at all, or solid color." 



The Editor's Experience and Observations. Moreover, the 

 fact that males from the same matings, even though the matings 

 be restricted to pairs, are of much lighter shades than the females 

 is known to all those who are in the least familiar with the char- 

 acteristics of Barred Plymouth Rocks. This difference was, in 

 the recollection of the writer, much greater in years past than 



