often proved:" an
engraving even has been published of one celebrated hen-tailed victor. Mr.
Tegetmeier[408] has recorded the remarkable case of a brown-breasted red
Game-cock which, after assuming its perfect masculine plumage, became
hen-feathered in the autumn of the following year; but he did not lose
voice, spurs, strength, nor productiveness. This bird has now retained the
same character during five seasons, and has begot both hen-feathered and
male-feathered offspring. Mr. Grantley F. Berkeley relates the still more
singular case of a celebrated strain of "polecat Game-fowls," which
produced in nearly every brood a single hen-cock. "The great peculiarity in
one of these birds was that he, as the seasons succeeded each other, was
not always a hen-cock, and not always of the colour called the polecat,
which is black. From the polecat and hen-cock feather in one season he
moulted to a full male-plumaged black-breasted red, and in the following
year he returned to the former feather."[409]

I have remarked in my 'Origin of Species' that secondary sexual characters
are apt to differ much in the species of the same genus, and to be
unusually variable in the individuals of the same species. So it is with
the breeds of the fowl, as we have already seen, as far as the colour of
plumage is concerned, and so it is with the other secondary sexual
characters. Firstly, the comb differs much in the various breeds,[410] and
its form is eminently characteristic of each kind, with the exception of
the Dorkings, in which the form has not been as yet determined on by
fanciers, and fixed by selection. A single, deeply-serrated comb is the
typical and most common form. It differs much in size, being immensely
developed in Spanish fowls; and in a local breed called Red-caps, it is
sometimes "upwards of three inches in breadth at the front, and more than
four inches in length, measured to the end of the peak behind."[411] In
some breeds the comb is double, and when the two ends are cemented {254}
together it forms a "cup-comb;" in the "rose-comb" it is depressed, covered
with small projections, and produced backwards; in the horned and
creve-coeur fowl it is produced into two horns; it is triple in the
pea-combed Brahmas, short and truncated in the Malays, and absent in the
Guelderlands. In the tasselled Game a few long feathers arise from the back
of the comb; in many breeds a crest of feathers replaces the comb. The
crest, when little