COLOR AND STRUCTURE OF PLUMAGE 95 



equally good buff cockerels and pullets produced from a single pen. 

 Yet there are instances of buff breeders winning well year after year 

 on their males and rarely having a top quality female, and vice versa. 



A certain exhibitor won at the Quincy (Illinois) show, November, 

 1918, on her hens and pullets, as she had done over a series of years. 

 She came to the writer and asked him how she could produce some 

 good cockerels. Here, in substance, was the reply: "You will have 

 10 get a good male, madam, before you can breed good cockerels. 

 If you are to have the kind of cockerels you want, you will have to 

 have that kind of a sire close up in the ancestry." 



Later she returned and said: "I have bought a cockerel from 



Mr. , who is showing here. He always wins on males, has 



done so for a number of years, and the judge says that his first 

 cockerel this year is good enough for Madison Square Garden. He 

 always shows good males just as I show the winning females. I 

 wish you would come over and look at the bird I have bought and 

 tell me how you would mate him. Would you mate him to the females 

 in my first pen?" 



The answer was "No." Then we said: "Breeding is not as simple 

 as mating the best to the best. You must take into account the tend- 

 encies in your line. You propose a union of two lines one with a 

 tendency to males and the other to females." 



Our advice was: "Take your best females and breed them to a 

 cockerel of your own line, and thus make certain that you can come 

 back next year and win on pullets. You know your own blood will 

 knick and your line will breed that way. Mate your purchased male 

 to some good big females to make sure of size and substance 

 females that are left from your first mating and if you do not pro- 

 duce a single cockerel the equal of its sire, do not be discouraged, but 

 remember that you are starting a new line. Take the biggest, strong- 

 est pullets that the purchased male sires and mate them back to him, 

 and two years from now you will come to Quincy and win on 

 cockerels." 



The growth of plumage. We have been considering color and 

 markings and how they behave in transmission. Now let us give some 

 thought to the growth and development of all the good and beautiful 

 that we have bred into the plumage. 



The feathers grow from the under layer of the skin, there being 

 three layers. All of the material of which they are made, including 

 the pigment, must be supplied by the blood through the skin. As 

 the new feathers grow, they are sheathed with a horny substance 

 which serves to protect the great mass of detail which the new 

 feather is to comprise, and this horny covering probably aids also 

 in the growth of the feather. This pin feather is conical in shape, and 

 as it grows it splits up, the sheath falls off, and the feathers open out. 



It requires a minimum of about six weeks for a feather to grow 



