CHAPTER IX. 



As Poultry Expert. 



Concurrently with his keeping and studying 

 bees and pigeons, Tegetmeier bred and studied 

 domestic fowls, on which subject he was to 

 become " recognized as perhaps the greatest 

 living authority," and we must now " hark 

 back " to the period of the early 'fifties. About 

 the first year of that decade he was residing at 

 Tottenham, and his early writings on poultry 

 prove that he had been devoting close attention 

 to the subject for several years. Perhaps it is 

 an echo of his medical training that his first 

 writings should have been on the diseases of 

 fowls, but the fact remains that in the year 

 1853 he contributed a series of articles on that 

 subject to a weekly journal called the Cottage 

 Gardener, and, as we shall see in the next 

 chapter, it was in 1855 that he was introduced 

 to Darwin as one " who knows all about poultry 

 and pigeons." It was also in the year 1853 that 

 his first book on domestic fowls appeared. It 

 was a modest little treatise of thirty- two pages, in 

 paper covers, entitled " Profitable Poultry : their 

 Management in Health and Disease," and was 

 illustrated with three full-page drawings of fowls 

 by Harrison Weir, with a sketch of one on front 



