102 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 



legs, and plumage finely barred in black and white like that 

 of a Barred Rock. The shape of the bird and its sprightly 

 bearing suggest something of the style of English Game. 

 The Scots Grey has been called the Scottish "Dorking," 

 but its appearance suggests rather that it may 'correspond 

 to an early stage in the evolution of such a breed as the 

 Dorking. It may indeed be a developed representative of 

 the early progenitors of the Dorking breed (itself perfected 

 in our Islands), a surviving link with the undeveloped 

 poultry of the good old days, which sold at ^d. each (as at 

 Braemar in i 567). The carriage of the Scots Grey is that of 

 the Jungle Fowl, but how great a change has transformed 

 the reds and golden yellows of the wild bird into the sober 

 chequer of the domesticated stock. 



Even greater divergences from the wild stock mark the 

 second distinctive Scots breed the Scottish Dumpie(Fig. 24) 

 in which the plumage is also of a sombre grey due to fine 

 alternating bars of darker and lighter colour, but in which 

 the agile pose and graceful build of the Jungle Fowl have 

 been entirely lost in a maximum of clumsiness and awkward 

 bulk. For it is distinctive of Scottish Dumpies that their 

 bodies are large, deep and remarkably long, and that this 

 great bulk is carried on shanks of extreme shortness, rarely 

 exceeding an inch and a half in length. Domestication has 

 led to an extraordinary increase in productiveness, for 

 the egg-laying of even the poorest breeds is a marvellous 

 tribute to the selective influence of man, when contrasted 

 with the limited clutches of seven to twelve eggs laid once 

 a year by the ancestral Jungle Fowl. Comparison of the 

 wild Jungle Fowl of eastern Asia with a typical Scottish 

 Dumpie shows the surprising power which man has wielded 

 over size and structure in perfecting the domesticated fowl. 

 As great change he has wrought in colouring of plumage 

 also. It must not be inferred, however, that this comparison 

 implies that the changes were all wrought in Scotland. This 

 is not so, since in Scotland the Dumpie and the Scots Grey 

 as well, were evolved, not directly from their original wild 

 ancestor, but through the intermediary of some domesticated 

 race imported from the East. 



