486 
FANCIERS’ JOURNAL AND POULTRY EXCHANGE. 
tain, and sailor should be forgotten,” &c. But I will add 
here, that inasmuch as no such ship ever arrived at New York , 
either in I'M® first, or in 1846 afterwards (as the two Cornish 
letters “ accurately state”), this fact will better account for 
all this “forgetting,” or “never knowing the names of 
either sailor, ship, captain, or original owner” of these 
“large light-gray fowls, so reported to have been found” 
somewhere (?) for Mr. Chamberlin. 
Prom 1843 to 1852 I was employed in the Boston custom- 
house. The gentleman who succeeded me as assistant cashier 
there was subsequently transferred, as deputy collector, to 
the custom-house in New York. I went on there afterwards, 
where, through his courtesy, I had access to the old customs 
registers in New York, from a careful examination of which, 
though I previously knew all about this Bennett “ Brahma- 
pootra ” business, I ascertained the following two important 
facts, viz., that there is not upon the records of the foreign 
inward arrival lists there, any mention made of any ship or 
vessel from “ the port of Luckipoor, in India,” in any month 
of the year 1849, first ; nor is any such arrival at New York 
recorded “ in September ” (or in any other month) “ of the 
year 1846,” after. Nor does any such arrival appear, either 
in 1849 or in 1846, in the daily newspaper shipping lists, 
published at those two periods, in New York. 
This finishes the sailor-Cornish story, which, no doubt, Mr. 
Cornish and Mr. Chamberlain believed when it was first told. 
But, as Tegetmeier truthfully asserted in 1853, “ there isn’t 
a particle of evidence in this to show that these fowls ever 
came from India.” Dr. Bennett, one of Mr. Wright’s 
claimed chief witnesses, purchased of me for $50 the first 
pair of Grays I ever bred, from which he bred the first so- 
called “Brahmapootra” chickens he ever exhibited, at 
Fitchburg Railroad depot hall ( vide official report of judges 
at that exhibition) in Boston, Mass., and the Cornish (Hatch) 
fowls then shown, were there called Chittagongs (as see Cor- 
nish’s two letters, and the report), and in a later official re- 
port also (in 1854) of the “ National Society’s ” show in New 
York, of which the Hon. A. B. Allen, in the Agriculturist, 
says : 
“Of their kinds, it was the choicest exhibition ever wit- 
nessed in America, and there were shown scarcely a pair 
of inferior birds (where I took twenty- one prizes for my 
‘Gray Hhanghais ’ and others). The judges say: ‘Though 
we have been governed by the nomenclature in the lists, we 
by no means assent to it as a proper classification. In our 
opinion, Shanghai and Cochin are convertible terms; but 
“ Brahmapootra ” unquestionably is a name for a subvariety 
of Shanghais. ... We recommend that all thoroughbred 
large Asiatic fowls be classed under the name Shanghai, to be 
further designated appropriately by their color. And we 
earnestly insist that all ridiculous unmeaning aliases of fowls 
be abandoned, and a simple, truthful classification in name 
be strictly observed in the future.’ ” 
This in 1854 (when this “Brahmapootra” nonsense was 
being sharply urged by its advocates, but which had not even 
then been agreed to), though Cornish says (see Wright, page 
143, “ Brahma Fowl ”) “ the name Brahmapootra was estab- 
lished in 1850!” 
My “ Gray Shanghais,” entered at the Fitchburg depot 
show, first above spoken of, the year before, and again that 
same year also, as such, together with Dr. J. C. Bennett’s, 
and the fowls entered there by Hatch and others, were de- 
clared by the judges to be “ all of the same stock, evidently 
Shanghais ” (see report), where all these contributions (ex- 
cept mine) were condemned by the committee as being 
“ palpably misnamed ” by the other contributors. 
All these real facts regarding the “true origin ” of the 
now so-called Brahma fowls, have been studiously ignored 
by Wright, as he does not refer to the above true particulars, 
in either of his two late works ! Yet, in a letter I received 
from Mr. Wright recently, dated London, May 23d, 1874, 
he says : “ As to the Brahma question, I can’t say positively 
what conclusion I might have come to, were I in America, 
and able to hunt up evidence on the spot. In my books, I 
could only do my best with the evidence that was accessible 
to me The difficulty in my mind is not with Dr. 
Bennett, at all, but with the plain, accurate, definite state- 
ments of Mr. Cornish. I do not quite understand whether 
you mean to flatly contradict Mr. Cornish, or not.* His 
account is, as I have stated, the ‘ difficulty,’ &c.” And it is 
of this very distortion, and the utterly unwarrantable perver- 
sion of this very Cornish “ evidence,” Mr. Wright has so 
strangely applied to me and my stock, that I complain ! 
My controversy is not (and never has been) with Messrs. 
Cornish or Chamberlin, Dr. Bennett or Colonel Weld. 
They have been allowed by me to tell their stories, in their 
own way, about their fowls, which never interfered with me 
or mine, until Mr. Wright tortured their accounts into some 
remote connection with what I had written and said about 
my own birds ; while I never alluded to this other stock, 
and did not claim (but always denied!) that any body’s 
“Brahmapootras,” were my “Gray Shanghais;” though 
I still believe, as Dr. Bennett stated to Dr. Gwynne, in 
1852, that my stock and the other “ were precisely similar,” 
and that all were bred from the original Gray Shanghais. 
Here I have done for the present.* I have given, I 
think, sufficient proof and reasons why Mr. Lewis Wright^ 
who claims that even the Poultry Fancy may be discussed 
in a reverent spirit, should not have thus inconsiderately 
and unjustly assailed, and wrongfully implicated, George 
P. Burnham in this “ Brahmapootraism.” 
Melrose, Mass., July, 1874. 
ROUP, COLDS, CANKER. 
After many experiments, through quite a length of time, 
I am convinced that the use of Labarraque’s solution, as 
described by Dr. Kunze in the World, is a certain remedy. 
Roup is but a protracted, aggravated cold, and I have found 
it produced most quickly by dampness and drafts. By caus- 
ing the roof of one of my houses to leak last winter I very 
soon had several cases ; by placing half-grown chicks in a 
house with a damp floor I soon caused colds and roup. In 
each of my breeding-pens I have small houses, 6x8, with 
one wide perch near the floor, running the length of the 
house. At each end of one of these perches I made a small 
hole, so as to cause a draft. In this house I placed five 
Brahmas. In a few days four of them had colds. Two of 
them I removed, and by the use of an aperient, alum-water, 
soft food, and a dry, warm coop, I very quickly cured them. 
Very soon after the other three had roup, two so badly as to 
be unable to see, and to breathe with difficulty. I used 
Labarraque’s solution three times daily, giving a dose of oil 
the first day. They were soon completely cured. The other 
hen meanwhile had developed the worst case of all. I “ doc- 
tored ” her but once each day, and in a few days all cheesy 
* In a forthcoming new work of mine, to be published this fall, enti- 
tled “ The China Fowl: Shanghai, Cochin, and Brahma ,” I shall give the 
true history of this matter, more fully than I can do in the limited 
columns of a paper. — G. P. B. 
