The evolution of the Bronze Turkey in America is one of the most interesting things in poultry culture. The work was done on a very large scale. It was not just a few breeders that engaged in grading up domestic turkeys with wild blood, but a great many scattered all over the country. Many, remote from places where wild turkeys ranged, paid high prices for full-blooded wild males, and also for grades with a large proportion of wild blood. In this way the wild blood was very widely distributed. As the superiority of the bronze type became established, turkey growers everywhere bought Bronze males to head their flocks, and so in a remarkably short time Bronze Turkeys of a type much superior to the old domestic stock became the common turkeys in many districts. [Illustration: Fig. 156. Flock of White Holland Turkeys] Interest in the American Bronze Turkey arose in England at a very early stage of this development. In fact, there is some reason to believe that the publicity given to several early shipments of small lots of wild turkeys to France and England did more than anything else to direct the attention of breeders in this country to the value of systematic breeding to fix the characters which wild blood introduced. The most celebrated of these shipments was one taken to France by Lafayette on his return from his last visit to the United States in 1825. About this time, or earlier, an English nobleman, who had some American wild turkeys, presented his sovereign with a very fine horse. The king, instead of expressing pleasure with the gift, intimated that he would prefer some of the wild turkeys, and was accordingly presented with a pair. The use of wild blood to give greater vigor to domestic stock continues, though it gives no better results now than the use of vigorous Bronze Turkeys many generations removed from wild ancestry. [Illustration: Fig. 157. Bronze Turkey cock. (Photograph by E. J. Hall)] =Influence of the Bronze Turkey on other varieties.= Although White turkeys have long been very popular in some parts of Europe, in this country they were, until recently, considered too weak to be desirable for any but those who kept them as a hobby. By chance mixtures of Bronze and White turkeys, and in some instances by systematic breeding, white turkeys that were large and vigorous were produced. Some of these were large enough to be called mammoths, as the largest Bronze Turkeys were. A few breeders who had these big white turkeys advertised them as Mammoth White Turkeys produced by Mammoth Bronze Turkeys as sports and in no way related to the old, weakly white birds. But whatever may have been the case at the outset, in a few years the Mammoth Whites were so mixed with others that the distinction was lost, for the best buyers of superior white turkeys were those who liked the color and had inferior stock which they wished to improve. All white turkeys in America now go by the old name, "White Holland Turkeys."