272 POULTRY BREEDING 
him the instrument of his pleasure by watching him fight, 
an amusement that is in high favor today in our semi- 
civilized possessions in the Far East. One writer says 
many wild jungle cocks are captured by taking tame ones 
to their haunts and getting them in a fight with their 
wild kind. 
The story of the distribution of the domestic fowl} is 
the story of how history was made. Two theories have 
been formulated to account for the presence of domestic 
fowls in the more civilized parts of the world, as early at 
least as the beginning of our era. One is that when the 
Aryans swarmed out of India and began their long jour- 
ney to the West to become the empire-builders of the 
world, they brought with them domestic fowls as well as 
other domesticated animals. If they did, the fowls were 
the only living things that survived, as there is no evi- 
dence that any of the domestic animals we now have 
descended in a direct line from the farther eastern coun- 
tries of the ancient world. 
Another seemingly and more reasonable theory is that 
when Cyrus made his great foray into India more than 
500 years before Christ he brought back to Persia fowls 
such as the inhabitants of India kept in domestication. 
Two centuries later Alexander overran Persia and from 
his invasion fowls came to Greece. These the Grecians 
called “Persian” fowls, this being strong proof that this 
theory of the distribution of domestic poultry is a better 
one than the first. 
In the period reaching back to 500 or 600 years before 
the beginning of the Christian era, literature has frequent 
references to domestic fowls, and they were figured on 
monuments and tombs. Zoroaster, who lived more than 
500 years before Christ, and founded a religion named 
