354 MR. J. T. CUNNINGHAM ON 



Red Game Cock. According to Bateson, white skin is dominant' 

 to yellow, and I believe this was the case in the F^ generation in 

 this experiment. In the F., generation, omitting one specimen in 

 which the colour of the legs was not noted, there Avere 19 pink 

 legs to 11 yellow. The number of recessives was therefore 

 considerably in excess of the expected number, namely 11 yellow 

 to 33 pink, or 1 to 3. This is, of course, in a total of 30 

 individuals of no special significance. 



It is evident from these results that the Pile type of coloration 

 is, like the Andalusian, a heterozygote and not a pure character 

 which breeds true, and that it results from crossing the dominant 

 white of the White Leghorn with the Black-red of the Game. 

 Fanciers have stated this before, but they have not recorded the 

 individual results nor the segregation of the F, generation. Thus 

 Mr. John Douglas in Wright's ' Book of Poultry,' 1885, states: 

 " You can also get a very rich Pile by putting a Wheaten hen to 

 a White or Pile cock.'' The Wheaten hen is one of the types of 

 the hen of the Black-red Game. Mr. Douglas also says that Piles 

 breed true to colour, but that now a,nd then a cross of the Black- 

 red is thrown in to give hardness of feather. My results are not 

 in agreement with this statement. Mr. Fred Smalley. of Silverdale, 

 Lancashire, who bred Pile Game for many yeai'S, kindly answering 

 enquiries from me in 1913, wrote that Pile was dominant to 

 Black-red, and that when bred together. Piles worked out to too 

 much washed-out colour, but could never produce pure white. 

 For this reason they were crossed with Black-red once in seven 

 years. He also informed me that a cross of White Leghorn hens 

 with a Brown Leghorn cock, or White Wyandotte hens with 

 Partridge Wyandotte cock, would produce birds of the pile 

 coloration, though they might not be up to standard Pile colour. 



In the F^ generation, however, the heterozygotes were not all 

 alike, but varied considerably in the amount of colour shown — in 

 other words, in the degree of dominance of the -white character of 

 the maternal parent. The 8 cocks all ultimately developed the 

 pile marking, six of them having red colour on the back of 

 varying intensity, and two having only yellow instead of red, one 

 having straw-colour and the other pale yellow. Of the 7 hens, 

 four were fairly typical Piles, the other three were white with 

 scattered black or grey feathers. 



The two groups of F,'s mated to px-oduce the second generation 

 both produced some piles, as might be expected since the birds of 

 F, were all heterozygotes. The birds of F., would be expected to 

 produce pure dominants (DD), i. e. white, piles (DR) and black- 

 red, i. e. recessives (RR) in the proportion of 1 : 2 : 1. The deeply 

 coloured hens in th.e F„ generation are the recessives : unfortunately 

 there were no deeply coloured, i. e. black-red, cocks. The three 

 coloured hens are all very different from each other, and this is an 

 interesting fact. If we regard the black-red coloration as a single 

 character, a recessive allelomorph to the dominant white, we should 

 naturally expect recessive individuals to be closely alike, whereas 



