400 



POULTRY CULTURE 



Fig. 394. Dominique cock. (Photograph from 

 owner, A. Q. Carter, Freeport, Maine) 



three years the undesirable 

 features that it brought 

 had been bred out, and in 

 the May stock of the orig- 

 inal Essex strain had ap- 

 peared the modern Barred 

 Plymouth Rock. It was in 

 his work with this stock 

 that May devised the 

 double system of mating 

 necessary to produce birds 

 that match in the show pen. 

 The Barred Plymouth 

 Rock. As bred for exhibi- 

 tion the Barred Plymouth 

 Rock owes most of its merit 

 to the May-Essex strain. 

 The blood has been so widely distributed and so effectively used 

 that, whatever the founda- 

 tion, practically all Barred 

 Rock stock of first-rate qual- 

 ity presents the character 

 first successfully developed 

 in it. Individual taste in 

 poultry breeders, and indi- 

 vidual qualities in the birds 

 they use, tend to slight vari- 

 ations in stocks, but pro- 

 nounced strain differences 

 have quite disappeared. In 

 color there has been con- 

 stant improvement. The 

 ideal, from the time when 

 Upham first saw the cross- 

 bred Spalding chickens, was 

 a bluish-gray bird barred 



, ,, 1 u ^95' ■"^'''"^" Plymouth Rock cock. (Pho- 



evenly all over, — both tograph from United States Department of 



sexes of the same shade Agriculture) 



