THE RUFF. 233 



chivalry, when the highest ambition of man was to imitate 

 the conduct and even assume the name of the game-cock. 



Their gallinaceous characters are indeed so striking, that 

 they might, with no very great impropriety, be called " fen 

 poultry." The males are considerably larger than the females ; 

 they are furnished, in the breeding season, with a large 

 accession of produced and glossy feathers, forming a ruff or 

 mantle over the breast and neck as far as the scapulars, and 

 with a long erectable tuft of similar feathers behind each eye ; 

 and though they have not combs and wattles like the males 

 of the common fowl, the face becomes covered with naked 

 fleshy tubercles of a reddish yellow colour, at the same time 

 that the produced feathers of the ruff and ear-tufts appear. 

 It is true that, in the moult after the breeding time, the 

 seasonal appendages of the ruffs disappear, while those of the 

 common poultry remain. But that may be considered as a 

 climatal difference. Poultry (genus Gallus) are natives of the 

 evergreen jungles of the south of Asia, and they are with us only 

 in a domestic state, and sheltered during the winter. Buffs, 

 again, belong to the latitudes of deciduous vegetation, and they, 

 like the trees of their native localities, have a seasonal repose ; 

 while the great production of seasonal appendages, shows that 

 they feel more the influence of the season of reanimation. 

 I will not be positive, but I think I have observed greater 

 differences in the seasonal plumage of the males of common 

 poultry, in the bleak and exposed situations of the north of 

 Scotland, than in the south of England ; and that generally, 

 in proportion as animals of one climate are more freely 

 exposed in another, they assume more the habits and charac- 

 ters of the native animals of that one. Ruffs are more easily 

 fattened in confinement than most other wild birds ; and 

 their flesh tastes more like that of poultry. 



They have partly the form of the sand-pipers, and they are 

 migratory ; but they have less of the running or wading cha- 



