The genetic and the operative evidence relating to secondary sexual charactersMorgan, Thomas Hunt
Science
The genetic and the operative evidence relating to secondary sexual characters
Morgan, Thomas Hunt
Genetics; Poultry; Sex (Biology)
The results published by the Rev. E. Lewis Jones in 1914, describing
crosses between two breeds of Campines, one called Belgian (which has
hen-feathered males), the other English (that has cock-feathered males),
are summarized in the table on page 16. They show the dominance of
hen-feathering with some probability. The table given there is the
original, to which the author has kindly added the numbers here prefixed
to some of the classes. The numbers are not large enough in all cases to
be satisfactory, but the dominance of the hen-feathering is, I think,
apparent, as well as its non-sex-linked transmission. The golden female
in C must have been English type, or at any rate heterozygous for
English-type feathering, for if Belgian her sons would have been Belgian
type.
Punnett and Bailey (1914) have published the result of a cross with
hen-feathered Silver Sebrights and Hamburgs. The dominance of
hen-feathering in the male is shown in the figures that illustrate their
paper, but as the paper deals solely with the inheritance of weight the
account of inheritance of hen-feathering was deferred to a later paper,
that has not yet appeared.
HEREDITY OF COLOR IN THE CROSS BETWEEN SEBRIGHT AND BLACK-BREASTED GAME
BANTAM.
The cross between the Sebright and the Black-Breasted Game bantam was
undertaken primarily to study the inheritance of hen-feathering. The
Sebright was chosen, on the one hand, because this race is pure for
hen-feathering, whereas in other races, such as the Campines, both kinds
of males are known. The hen-feathered birds of such races are, I
believe, frequently not pure for hen-feathering. The game race was
chosen because the cock has the typical plumage of the wild bird,
_Gallus bankiva_, and although his feathers are remarkably short, they
show the characteristic cock-feathered type.
Only secondarily was the experiment concerned with color inheritance.
The two breeds differ so markedly in coloration and pattern that the
very complex results that appeared in F₂ were to be expected. In
addition to the differences involving hen-feathering _versus_
cock-feathering, and Sebright plumage _versus_ game plumage, the game is
strongly dimorphic in the plumage, while in the Sebright the coloration
of the two sexes is closely similar. But the castration experiments have
shown that this difference is the result of hen-feathering in the
Sebright cock, and that the race carries the same potential dimorphism
as do other races of poultry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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