CHAPTER II 

 EVOLUTION OF MODERN FOWL 



By what process, then, has the small jungle fowl, pro- 

 ducing little meat and few eggs, been converted into the 

 Brahma and the Leghorn of great meat- and egg-producing 

 qualities ? What brought about the change in the fowl that 

 enables the poultryman of to-day to gather ten dozen eggs 

 a year instead of one dozen or a dozen and a half, which was 

 the order of the hen-day at the birth of chicken civilization ? 

 By what miracle has the meat on the fowl's skeleton been 

 multiplied six times ? Whence have come the various colors 

 of feather, the top-knot, the feather legs, and tails 20 feet 

 long? 



There has been abundant opportunity in some three thou- 

 sand years for the type and characteristics of the jungle 

 fowl to be largely lost in the evolution of newer and better 

 races of fowls. If the modern horse is descended from an 

 animal not much larger than a Jack rabbit, why not a Brah- 

 ma from a Bantam-sized fowl ? We must disabuse our minds 

 of the idea that poultry-keeping is a modern institution. 

 It is idle to repeat that the fowl we see to-day on the farms 

 and in the backyards are the product of the past fifty or 

 even hundred years. It has taken hundreds or thousands 

 of years to bring them to the stage of perfection that we now 

 have them. Harrison Weir in ' * The Poultry Book' ' says on 

 this point : ' ' Nearly all our modern methods are only the 

 old ones re-substituted, even that of the incubator. In the 

 olden time they kept fowls and bred chickens with a greater 

 certainty and in better health than many of the now profes- 



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