454 FANCIERS’ JOURNAL AN 
D POULTRY EXCHANGE. 

He presently quotes, on page 16, a long letter from Mr. 
V. Cornish, of Connecticut (dated March 2, 1852), about 
some ‘light gray fowls’? which a Mr. Chamberlin “ got a 
sailor to go after.’’ This sailor, subsequently, ‘‘ reported 
that he had fownd a pair, which he purchased of a man in 
New York,” whose name nobody ever got, and ‘‘ who could 
give no account of their origin,” &c. 
From this Chamberlin pair of grays, Mr. Cornish got his 
stock. ‘These fowls were named Chittagongs,’’ adds Mr. 
Cornish, ‘‘on account of their resemblance to the large gray 
fowls then bred in this country, and so called,’’ &c. I had 
then been breeding my “large gray fowls,” in Massachu- 
setts, three years; the originals of which I procured in 1849, 
of Dr. Kerr, of Philadelphia, and Mr. Porter, from Shang- 
hai, in 1850; and here is a portrait of the Dr. Kerr cock— 
drawn from life and printed in Dr. J. C. Bennett’s ‘‘ Poultry 
Book,’’ in which may be judged of as to its identity 1850, 
with the so-called ‘‘ Brahmas’’ of to-day—though this pic- 
ture was taken when the bird was but eight months old, and 
quite undeveloped in proportions, of course; which fowl was 
then called by Dr. Bennett ‘‘ Chittagong,’ precisely as Cor- 
nish called his fowls in his 1852 letter. i 






Now, please mark! In this same Dr. Bennett’s Poultry 
Book, issued at Boston, in 1850 and ’51 (with appendix), not 
one word is mentioned by Bennett, in his entire 310 pages, 
upon all the then ‘‘ known breeds of domestic modern poul- 
try,’’ about the existence of Chamberlin, Cornish, Knox, 
Brahma-Pootra, or Brahma fowls; while my superb Grays 
are set down as “‘ firstin the list of known varieties,’’ ‘‘a very 
superior bird,’ “the wonder and admiration of all fowl 
fanciers who behold”’ this extraordinary new variety, &c. ; 
‘true portraits from life, from the breeding stock of Geo. 
P. Burnham, Esq., of Roxbury, Mass.,” &c. (This was 
written and published in 1849, ’50, three years prior to Cor- 
nish’s letter.) 
In 1851 (having sold this Kerr pair to Dr. Bennett, after 
I got my second lot of light Gray Shanghais, of Porter, 
from China), Dr. Bennett bred this very cock and hen, with 
a light drab (or silver cinnamon) Forbes Shanghai hen— 
produced a clutch of handsome light gray chickens, which 
he (Dr. Bennett) exhibited in Boston, and called ‘ Burram- 
pooters,’’ from India. These three light gray chickens were 
the first so-called ‘‘ Brahma-Pootras,”’ or now ‘‘ Brahmas,’) 
ever publicly shown in the world. All of them had a slight | 


top-knot, or streamer, as Dr. Bennett called it; and here I 
present exact portraits of said trio, ‘‘drawn from life by 
Durivage,”’ in 1851. By comparing this trio with the cut 
from life above, of my original gray Dr. Kerr cock, the 
likeness to the parentage will be very clearly seen—leaving 
out the small top-knot, which came probably from the Forbes 
hen Dr. Bennett bred with my grays, at first. 

I propose to give Mr. Wright the full benefit of the fol- 
lowing voluntary important statement of his, which appears 
on page 17 of his ‘‘ Brahma Fowl” book; he there says: 
‘A portion of Mr. Cornish’s letter not quoted (at its first 
printing), states, that Chamberlin brought his fowls into 
Connecticut in 1849.” The reader will observe that this 
account is taken from Mr. Cornish’s letter, dated March 
2d, 1852; but in 1869 (nearly 20 years afterwards), a Mr. 
Weld turns up, with another letter of Cornish’s, dated Nov. 
9th, 1869, which Wright publishes at the end of this book, 
page 142, in which Mr. Cornish then says: ‘The ship ar- 
rived in New York (with the Chamberlin fowls) in Sep- 
tember, 1846, and the first brood came out in 1847, most of 
which I purchased in August.’? These are Mr. V. Cornish’s 
own words, first ‘‘in 1849,” afterwards ‘in 1846.” 
Now, did he get two lots—one in 1849 (as he declares he 
did, on page 17), and the other in 1846-’47 (as he asserts in 
1869, on page 142, of Wright’s book)? If not, and nobody 
in America has pretended that he ever got but one lot, how 
could Chamberlin have got ‘ the original birds 2” 
But I am speaking now ‘by the card,” and I wish to 
say just here, that I know Mr. Cornish to be a very 
worthy man. But are these two statements, as Weld says, 
‘‘clearly accurate?’ And do the two dates here, of 1849, 
first, and 1846, twenty years subsequently, corroborate Mr. 
Cornish’s account in any particular, and sustain Wright’s 
theory, as he says they do? Or, is it not clearly an attempt 
on Wright’s part, at “anything to beat Burnham 2?” 
In Wright, page 17, we have it thus: Cornish says that 
‘‘Chamberlin brought his fowls into Connecticut in the 
early part of 1849.” Mr. Cornish says in the same letter, 
‘“‘I got my stock from Chamberlin, direct.’ Then he says 
(in 1869), “the ship arrived in 1846! Most of the first 
