404 
ON THE ORIGIN OF 
that iio authentic traditionary traces now remain of its ori- 
ginal introduction to any of the more ancient kingdoms of 
the earth, and its existence under the protection of man, 
seems indeed coeval with the most antique records. It is 
one of those especial gifts, which, like the faithful and ac- 
commodating dog, may be said at an early period of the 
world to have joined its fortunes with those of the first 
families of the human race, to have followed man in his 
wonderful and far-spread migrations, and, adapting its con- 
stitution with facility to the varied circumstances of clime 
and country which these migrations produced, to have 
finally lost, in consequence of such plastic nature, almost 
all resemblance to the source from which it sprung. For 
some thousand years the observers of nature were ignorant 
of any wild species, which even in a remote degree resem- 
bled any variety of the domestic breed, and from the era 
of Herodotus to that of Sonnerat, the domestic cock and 
hen might have been regarded as birds, the living analogues 
of which were no longer known to exist in a natural and 
unsubdued condition. 
In consequence of the remote obscurity in which the 
subject is thus involved, few points in natural history have 
occasioned more inconclusive speculation, or are even now 
more difficult to determine with precision than the source 
from which we originally derived the different races of our 
domestic poultry. That they came originally from Persia, 
has been inferred from this among other circumstances, that 
Aristophanes calls the cock " the Persian Bird." Such an 
origin is improbable, when we consider that the researches 
of modern travellers, and of all who have visited that coun- 
try since the revival of learning, have failed to discover 
there any species of wild poultry ; and although its orni- 
thology is not yet known in detail, especially as regards 
the smaller species, that so conspicuous a feature in its na- 
