MR. BURNHAM’S LAST. 
Friend Wade : 
I b<ave just read in yours of September 10th, Mr. Burn- 
ham’s letter, dated September 1st, of which I number the 
material sentences for convenience of categorical reply. It 
is so difficult to pin Mr. B. down to anything, that I am 
glad he has them put briefly what lie means. 
1. “I do not intend to follow Lewis Wright in his new 
vagaries, based upon what he now charges upon me as hav- 
ing been written in the ‘History of the Hen Fever,’ 
twenty years ago.” 
At the date this was written, and even at the date when 
it was published, nothing charged upon Mr. Burnham 
“ based upon ” anything in the Hen Fever, had reached 
America. "Mr. Burnham had simply read that a copy of 
that work had been furnished me. Why he there antici- 
pates the use I may make of it, I leave for your readers to de- 
termine. I simply state now, that I only use the work for 
purposes strictly proper to the controversy ; and that it is a 
very small part of the evidence I shall adduce to contradict 
his statements. 
2. “ He misquoted me, garbled my language in his books, 
interpolated the writings of others in his pretended quota- 
tions from them.” 
I regret I can only reply to this by saying that it is gra- 
tuitously, directly, and I fear I must add deliberately false. 
Whatever I have professed to quote, I have quoted. I can 
only state this here ; for fuller treatment I must refer to my 
replies in The Fanciers' Gazette. 
3. “ Made use of terms and names .of fowls which they 
and I did not use (as he printed them).” 
The only foundation for this is, that where Burnham said 
certain fowls were Shanghais, I said he had “ stated ” them 
to be “ Cochins ; ” simply because the fowls once called 
Shanghais, are now called Cochins by everybody. But 
even in this, I followed Mr. Tegetmeier, who Burnham says 
has given an “ accurate ” account, and treated him' and his 
fowls “but justly;” and the statement which he chiefly 
fastens on, and says that I thus falsely made, complaining 
that “ Mr. Wright ” says certain fowls were “ Gray Chitta- 
gongs crossed with Cochins,” while he claims never to have 
said so (because his statement was that the fowls were “ bred 
from Asa Bugg’s Gray Chittagong cock and a yellow Shang- 
hai hen ”) is not made by me personally, but is expressly 
quoted by me as from and by Mr. Tegetmeier. Why does 
what is “accurate” in that gentleman become “garbling” 
in me ? Different names of the same fowls do not alter the 
fowls, or the facts either. 
4. “Insidiously accredited me with the authorship of ar- 
ticles that I never wrote, but which I duly credited to the 
writers of them by name.” 
This can only refer to the long extract from the “Hen 
Fever” in “The Brahma Fowl.” As I have fully ex- 
plained in The Fanciers’ Gazette , this was copied by me 
verbatim from a manuscript copy of the passage, I not 
having the book then. But even so, every line not written 
by Burnham himself, appears quite correctly within double 
quotation marks as copied by him from some one else. And 
he does not acknowledge the author (of a portion of the ar- 
ticle only) “by name” at all. That is a falsehood. He is 
only spoken of as the “ Secretary ” of a certain Society ; and 
all the material portions of the extract are by Mr. Burnham 
himself, as will be seen by the full copy I have now given. 
This assertion is therefore totally false as regards that ex- 
tract, and has no possible reference to any other. For the 
full passage in question I must refer to The Fanciers’ Gazette. 
•5. “ He used Cornish’s two published letters to my detri- 
ment, Voluntariljq where in neither of these two documents 
. . . my name or my stock is not once alluded to.” 
I never said that they were, in “these two documents.” 
But the whole significance of this lies in the assertion Mr. 
Burnham has before in your columns deliberately made, that 
he “never” alluded to “this other stock, or claimed, but 
always denied,” that their or any “ Brahmas ” were the same 
as his “Gray Shanghais.” And so again, he has deliber- 
ately denied that he has ever had any “difference, written 
or verbal,” with either Bennett or Cornish. I am sorry to 
say this too is deliberately false. I quote in the “Book of 
Poultry” a third letter from Cornish in which the latter does 
allude to Mr. Burnham in far from complimentary terms. 
But, passing that, I do not wonder at his protesting against 
my quoting his early writings “ twenty years ago ; ” since I 
show, from them (the only way I can show it, of course), 
that he did, in these early days, distinctly assert that the 
Cornish-Bennett stock were “ Gray Shanghais ; ” that the 
two were “ identical,” &e. I also show that he on the one 
hand, and Cornish and Bennett on the other, were in direct 
and bitter “controversy” on this question. This he has 
denied : I quote him “ twenty years ago ” to show that the 
denial is a wilful falsehood ; and that we have to consider 
Cornish’s statement, and Burnham’s, one against the other, 
as made concerning the same fowls, whatever name Mr. B. 
wishes them to be called by. Hence it is that it becomes, 
as I said, a question of evidence ; and that I am now under 
the unpleasant, necessity of proving, what before I briefly 
stated only, what Mr. Burnham’s statements are worth, 
against those of one whom he has said he knows '“to be 
a very worthy man.” 
I can only, here, thus state my line of reply. For the re- 
plies themselves, I must refer to The Fanciers’. Gazette, only 
saying here that no single point raised by Burnham has 
been shirked by me. I have only to add that the private 
letter he refers to will now be published by me, exactly as 
he wrote it. I pledge myself, to print it exactly ; and if he 
denies that it is so printed, I shall ask your readers to be- 
lieve my statement that it is so, against his. After the un- 
scrupulous character of his recent statements, as I have 
