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Show 114 ON ABNORMALITIES IN DOMESTIC FOWLS. [June 16, June 16, 1903. F. Du C A N E GODMAN, Esq., D.C.L., F.R.S., Vice-President, in the Chair. The Secretary read the following report on the additions made to the Society's Menagerie in May 1903 :- The registered additions to the Society's Menagerie during the month of May were 122 in number. Of these 14 were acquired by presentation, 7 by purchase, 17 were born in the Gardens, and 84 were received on deposit. The total number of departures during the same period, by death and removals, was 143. Mr. F. Finn, F.Z.S., exhibited a living hen-feathered Bantam cock and the feet of a fowl showing a three-jointed hallux, and made the following remarks:- "Although there exist two breeds of fowls in which hen-feathering in the male is a constant character-the ' henny' Game and the Sebright Bantam-yet the occurrence of hen-feathering in the male as a casual variation appears to be so rare that I thought the present specimen worthy of exhibition to the Society. It is, as will be seen, a fully adult Bantam cock of no particular breed, and certainly shows no traces of Sebright blood, being single-combed and possessing black body-plumage and a white-bordered neck-hackle, with no trace of the characteristic black-laced plumage of Sir John Sebright's birds. It is interesting to recall that that gentleman made his celebrated breed hen-feathered by crossing into his strain a hen-tailed Bantam he came across casually, just as this one occurred to me. " Mr. W . Bateson (' Experimental Studies in the Physiology of Heredity': Royal Society, Reports to the Evolution Committee, I.) speaks of the occurrence of a chick with a long hallux bigeminus as an abnormality which was probably unrecorded. About a month before, however, in a letter published in 'Nature,' January 30th, 1902,1 had mentioned the occurrence of an abnormally long hallux in a common Egyptian fowl, which I regarded as the homologue of the ' fifth ' toe of birds possessing a double hallux. 1 did not keep this specimen, but I now exhibit the feet of another Egyptian fowl showing the same peculiarity, which I obtained last year. The long halluces have each three phalanges, but the foot, although looking powerful, had no particular power of grasping, as was the case with the first specimen I met with. I have seen another case of long single halluces in a fowl which I believed to be Egyptian, and one also in a ' Silky' fowl, this breed having usually five toes. As Egyptian fowls display a continuous variation from one normal hallux to the ' five-toed' forms, more research amongst them would be interesting." |