10 



THE AMERICAN BREEDS OF POULTRY 



did a new element get into these birds that enabled them to grow 

 a bigger bone, a larger body, a fuller plumage before they were 

 matured and cell division had ceased? We do not know. It is known 

 that the individual animal has a growth tendency or impulse to obtain 

 a certain size, and the best food will no more than enable it to attain 

 the upper limit of that size. The size possibilities of an animal's 

 skeleton are determined by heredity. 



Origin of the Chinese stock is unknown. Tegetmeier, who was 

 associated with Darwin in some of his researches, at first accepted 

 the theory that all breeds of domestic poultry originated from a 

 common primitive ancestry, but more extended and careful con- 

 sideration led him to the belief that the Cochin must have descended 

 from some large-bodied, short-winged, easily tamed species that 

 entirely passed into a state of domestication as did the camel and 

 the horse. 



Other scientists have suggested a multiple origin of the domestic 

 fowl. They have suggested that the case is similar to that of the 

 humped cattle of the Orient, which are believed to have descended 



from a different stock than 

 that which furnished a foun- 

 dation for the cattle of 

 Europe. However, the do- 

 mestication of animals was a 

 work performed by primitive 

 man. Even fowls appear to 

 have been domesticated be- 

 fore the dawn of civilization, 

 and man's own recorded his- 

 tory does not carry present- 

 day students back to within 

 sight of the early processes 

 and developments. Accord- 

 ing to an old Chinese ency- 

 clopedia, the domestic fowl 

 of China was first received 

 from the West about the year 

 1400 B. C. 



The Malayan stock. The 

 Malay, another old race of 

 the Orient, came from the 

 southeastern section of Asia, 

 particularly from the penin- 

 sula whose name it bears. It 

 is somewhat smaller than the 

 Cochin, representative speci- 

 mens that were imported in 

 the early days weighing nine 

 to eleven pounds for cocks 



A red game cock brought from Maley about 

 1846 by Captain Richard Wheatland, and bred 

 in Salem, Mass., for three seasons, and now 

 in preserved form in the Peabody Academy 

 of Science, Salem. This cock has a pea 

 comb, yellow legs, red plumage throughout, 

 including tail (except white in flight of one 

 wing). Under color, light to dark slate. This 

 type of Maley is generally credited as the 

 progenitor of the R, I. Red. 



