458 Domestic Fowls — Their Supposed Origin, ^c. 
the same forms, the fleshy comb on the head, the gait of our fowls, 
only they are smaller, being hardly larger than the common pigeon; 
their plumage is brown or rufous." 
Some older travellers have spoken before of these v^•ild fowl of 
South America. The Spaniard Acosta, provincial of the Jesuits 
at Peru, has positively said " that fowls existed there before the 
arrival of his countrymen, and that they were called in the lan- 
guage of the country, talpa, and their eggs, ponto. The ancient 
Mexican had reduced these small fowls to domestication; they 
called them, as Gemell Carreri informs us, chiacchialacca; and he 
adds, that they were similar to our domesticated fowl, except that 
they had brownish feathers, and that they are rather smaller. A 
fresh testimony, that of a traveller who has been all over Dutch 
Guiana after me, is again come in support of facts already certain. 
Captain Steadman has observed that the natives rear a very small 
species of fowls, whose feathers are ruffled, and which seem to 
be natives of that country." ( Voyages to Surinam, and in the in^ 
terior of Guiana.) It is then an indisputable fact, that a tribe of 
wild fowl, very much like our cocks and hens, exists in the inland 
parts of South America. One cannot reasonably suppose that 
this tribe springs from birds of the same genus which Europeans 
have transported thither, since they are only met with very far 
from any inhabited place; that there is a remarkable difference in 
the size of these and the common fowl ; and that, according to the 
assertion of Acosta, they existed in Peru befoie the arrival of the 
Spaniards. 
But a learned traveller, to whom ornithology in particular is 
indebted for many capital discoveries, M. Sonneret, has again 
found the species of the wild fowl on the antique land of India, in 
the mountains of the Gautes, which separate Malabar from Coro- 
mandel. More successful than other travellers, M. Sonneret took 
home two birds, a male and a female, of the Indian tribe, and 
published a description of them in his Travels to the Indies and 
China; and he has taken them to be the primitive stock, whence 
had sprung all the tribes of our domestic fowl. He concurred in 
the opinion of Buffon, that most of our varieties of domestic fowl 
have proceeded from a single type; and that the differences which 
we percieve among them have resulted from accidents of climate, 
domestication, and crossing of varieties. Sonneret, who did not 
or would not know of any other species of wild cock than this — 
for he speaks slightly of the authority of Dampier, who mentions 
that he saw wild cocks in the Indian Archipelago — naturally 
enough concluded that in this jungle fowl he had found the primi- 
tive stock. Subsequent inquiries have however, confirmed the 
statements of Dampier, not only as to the existence of species of 
wild fowl in the Indian Archipelago; but it is also admitted that the 
