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.

The Egyptian type of chicken spread to the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and from Southern Europe our non-sitting breeds of fowls have been imported.  Throughout the countries of Northern Europe minor differences were developed.  The French chickens were selected for the quality of the meat, while in Poland the peculiar top-knotted breed is supposed to have been formed.