78 ZOOLOGY OF INDIA. 



antique records. It may be regarded as one of those par- 

 ticular and providential gifts which, like the faithful and 

 accommodating dog, may be said to have joined its fortunes 

 at an early period of the world with those of the first families 

 of the human race, — to have followed man in his wonderful 

 and far-spread migrations, — and, adapting its constitution 

 with facility to the diversified circumstances of clime and 

 country which these migrations produced, to have finally 

 lost, in consequence of such plastic nature, almost all resem- 

 blance to the source from which it sprung. For some 

 thousand years the observers of nature were ignorant of any 

 wild species which, even in a remote degree, resembled any 

 variety of the domestic breed ; and from the era of Herodotus 

 to that of Sonnerat, the domestic cock and hen might have 

 been regarded as birds, the living analogues of which were 

 no longer known to exist in a natural and unsubdued con- 

 dition. , 



In consequence of the remote obscurity in which the sub- 

 ject is thus involved, few points in natural history have 

 occasioned more inconclusive speculation, or are even now 

 mote difficult to determine with precision, than the source 

 from which we primarily derived the different races of our 

 domestic poultry. That they came originally from Persia 

 has been inferred from this among other circumstances, that 

 Aristophanes calls the cock " the Persian bird." Such an 

 origin is, however, improbable, when we consider that the. 

 researches of modern travellers, and of all who have visited 

 that countrj' since the revival of learning, have failed to 

 discover there any species of wild poultry ; and although its 

 ornithology is not yet known in detail, especially as regards 

 the smaller species, that so conspicuous a feature in its 

 natural history as the existence of the bird in question should 

 have escaped the notice of recent inquirers is by no means 

 likely. In f^ct, no gallinaceous bird exists in Persia more 

 nearly allied to the genus Gallus than a species of Lopho- 

 phorus.* If, however, it is merely meant that the Greeks, 

 during the intercourse, hostile or otherwise, which existed 



* Maeneill's Lophophorus {Lnph. NigeUi of Jardine and Selby. Illust. 

 of Cm. pi. 76), so called in honour of Dr. Macneill, lately physician to 

 the English embassy at the Persian court, and now our resident at Bn- 

 shire. The species, of which the male is not yet known, wasfirst trans- . 

 milted to Europe by that gentleman. 



