The year following the Langshan winning, the first eleven winning
pens were all S.C.W. Leghorns. This is also remarkable--much more
remarkable in fact than the Langshans record. It is like a royal
flush in a poker game. Standing alone, this would be very suggestive
evidence of the eminence of the breed. Standing as it does, with the
combined evidence of years and numbers, it gives the S.C.W. Leghorn
hen the same reputation in Australia as she has in America and
Denmark--that of being the greatest egg machine ever created.
Isolated evidence is misleading. Accumulated evidence is convincing.
The difference between the scientist and the enthusiast is that the
former knows the difference between these two classes of evidence.
The Hen's Ancestors.
To one who is unfamiliar with the different types of chickens found
in a poultry showroom, it seems incredible that these varieties
should have descended from one parent source. It was, however, held
by Darwin that all domestic chickens were sprung from a single
species of Indian jungle fowl. Other scientists have since disputed
Darwin's conclusion, but it does not seem to the writer that the
origin of domestic fowls from more than one wild variety makes the
changes that have taken place under domestication any less
remarkable.
The buff, white and dominique colors, unheard of in wild species,
frizzles with their feathers all awry, the Polish with their
deformed skulls and the sooty fowls whose skin and bones are black,
are some of the remarkable characters that have sprung up and been
preserved under domestication. The varieties of domestic fowl form
one of the most profound exhibits of man's control over the laws of
inheritance. What makes these wonders all the more inexplicable is
that these profound changes were accomplished in an age when a
scientific study of breeding was a thing unheard of.
The wild chicken whom Darwin credits as the parent of the modern
gallinaceous menagerie, is smaller than modern fowls and is colored
in a manner similar to the Black-breasted Game. The habits of this
bird are like those of the quail and prairie-chicken, both of which
belong to the same zoological family.
From its natural home in India the chicken spread east and west.
Chinese poultry culture is ancient. In China, as well as in India,
the chief care seems to have been to breed very large fowls, and
from these countries all the large, heavily feathered and feather
legged chickens of the modern world have come.
Poultry is also known to have been bred in the early Babylonian and
Egyptian periods. Here, however, the progress was in a different
line from that of China. Artificial incubation was early developed,
and the selection was for birds that produced eggs continually,
rather than for those that laid fewer eggs and brooded in the
natural manner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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