form, "and are generally received by them with great
pleasure."[471] Several accounts have likewise been published of young
birds, reared in the United States from the eggs of the wild species,
crossing and commingling with the common breed. In England, also, this same
species has been kept in several parks; from two of which the Rev. W. D.
Fox procured birds, and they crossed freely with the common domestic kind,
and during many years afterwards, as he informs me, the turkeys in his
neighbourhood clearly showed traces of their crossed parentage. We here
have an instance of a domestic race being modified by a cross with a
distinct species or wild race. F. Michaux[472] suspected in 1802 that the
common domestic turkey was not descended from the United States species
alone, but likewise from a southern form, and he went so far as to believe
that English and French {293} turkeys differed from having different
proportions of the blood of the two parent-forms.
English turkeys are smaller than either wild form. They have not varied in
any great degree; but there are some breeds which can be distinguished--as
Norfolks, Suffolks, Whites, and Copper-coloured (or Cambridge), all of
which, if precluded from crossing with other breeds, propagate their kind
truly. Of these kinds, the most distinct is the small, hardy, dull-black
Norfolk turkey, of which the chickens are black, with occasionally white
patches about the head. The other breeds scarcely differ except in colour,
and their chickens are generally mottled all over with brownish-grey.[473]
The tuft of hair on the breast, which is proper to the male alone,
occasionally appears on the breast of the domesticated female.[474] The
inferior tail-coverts vary in number, and according to a German
superstition the hen lays as many eggs as the cock has feathers of this
kind.[475] In Holland there was formerly, according to Temminck, a
beautiful buff-yellow breed, furnished with an ample white topknot. Mr.
Wilmot has described[476] a white turkey-cock with a crest formed of
"feathers about four inches long, with bare quills, and a tuft of soft
white down growing at the end." Many of the young birds whilst young
inherited this kind of crest, but afterwards it either fell off or was
pecked out by the other birds. This is an interesting case, as with care a
new breed might probably have been formed; and a topknot of this nature
would have been to a certain extent analogous to that borne b
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