CHAPTER XIX. 
THE SILK FOWL. 
^PHE Silk fowl is one of very great antiquity. The celebrated naturalist Gesner, 
who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century (1516 to 1565), published 
engravings of several varieties of poultry in his ‘‘ History of Birds.” One of 
the fowls represented by him is a woolly hen, which he termed Gallina Laiiigera. 
The bird is represented without any tail-feathers ; rose-combed, clean legged, and 
with four-toed feet. Aldrovandus, whose treatise on birds was published in the 
following century (1645), enters largely into the different varieties known to the 
ancients ; he also describes and illustrates a woolly hen, and states that in the 
East, fowls are bred as white as snow, covered, not with feathers, but with wool, 
like sheep ; and that in the city of Quelinfu, in regno Mangi, M. Paulus Venetus 
says that hens are to be found which have, instead of feathers, hairs like those of 
a cat, and that in colour they are black, and lay good eggs. Aldrovandus’ s figure 
of the woolly fowl is tailless, and the wings are not visible ; the hen has a double 
comb, deeply serrated, well developed wattles, short and thick legs, and four- 
toed feet. At the period at which Aldrovandus wrote, these woolly fowls could 
not have been known in England, or even common on the Continent, for in 
Willoughby’s “ Ornithology,” published in 1678, and edited by the celebrated 
John Ray, it is stated — “The wool-bearing hen I take to be altogether fabulous, 
and its figure in Aldrovandus fictitious.” It is further suggested that it might 
be the frizzled hen, or even a cassovvary. There can be but little doubt, however, 
that the birds described by Gesner and Aldrovandus resembled what are now 
known as Silk fowls. 
The Silk fowl is a native of the East of Asia. Mr. Edward Blyth, formerly 
Curator of the Asiatic Society’s Museum, v/riting from Calcutta, states — “ The 
only Silky fowls I have seen here were from China, or Malacca, or Singapore : 
the latter with single red combs and wattles ; the former with complex, blackish 
rose-combs, very short, stubby beaks, and a quantity of glaucous blue skin in place 
of wattles, imparting a most remarkable appearance.” 
The usual colour for the plumage of Silk fowls is white with a black or dark- 
blue skin, the surface of the bones is also covered with a dark membrane or 
periosteum. The feathers have the webs separated, so that their covering seems 
formed of hair rather than that which is ordinarily allotted to birds ; the quill 
feathers of the wings have the filaments of the vanes so much divided that they 
are useless as a means of flight, and the tail in the best specimens is but little 
