After a few years the excitement began to subside, and most people supposed that it was about to die, never to revive. A Mr. Burnham, who had been one of the most energetic promoters of Asiatic fowls, and had made a small fortune while the boom lasted, had so little confidence in the permanence of the poultry fancy that he published a book called "The History of the Hen Fever," which presented the whole movement as a humbug skillfully engineered by himself. This book was very widely read, and the phrase "the hen fever," applying to enthusiastic amateur poultry keepers, came into common use. Subsequent developments showed that those who had supposed that the interest in fine poultry was only a passing fad were wrong. The true reason for its decline at that time was that the nation was approaching a crisis in its history and a civil war. When the war was over, the interest in poultry revived at once, and has steadily increased ever since. The prices for fine specimens, which were considered absurd in the days of the hen fever, are now ordinary prices for stock of high quality. [Illustration: Fig. 43. Barred Plymouth Rock cock. (Photograph from Bureau of Animal Industry, United States Department of Agriculture)] =How the American breeds arose.= It is natural to suppose that with such a variety of types of fowls, from so many lands, there was no occasion for Americans to make any new breeds. If, however, you look critically at the foreign breeds, you may notice that not one of them had been developed with reference to the simple requirements of the ordinary farmer and poultry keeper. It was the increasing demand for eggs and poultry for market that had given the first impulse to the interest in special breeds. The first claim made for each of these was that it was a better layer than the ordinary fowl. In general, these claims were true, but farmers and others who were interested primarily in producing eggs and poultry for the table were rather indifferent to the foreign breeds, because, among them all, there was not one as well adapted to the ordinary American poultry keeper's needs as the old Dominique or as the occasional flocks of the old native stock that had been bred with some attention to size and to uniformity in other characters.