Mr. Tegetmeier (7/48. 'Proceedings of Zoolog. Soc.' March 1861 page 102. The engraving of the hen-tailed cock just alluded to was exhibited before the Society.) 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." (7/49. 'The Field' April 20, 1861.)
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 (7/50. I am much indebted to Mr. Brent for an account, with sketches, of all the variations of the comb known to him, and likewise with respect to the tail as presently to be given), 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." (7/51. The 'Poultry Book' by Tegetmeier 1866 page 234.) In some breeds the comb is double, and when the two ends are cemented 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 rise from the back of the comb: in many breeds a crest of feathers replaces the comb. The crest, when little developed, arises from a fleshy mass, but, when much developed, from a hemispherical protuberance of the skull. In the best Polish fowls it is so largely developed, that I have seen birds which could hardly pick up their food; and a German writer asserts (7/52. 'Die Huhner- und Pfauenzucht' 1827 s. 11.) that they are in consequence liable to be struck by hawks. Monstrous structures of this kind would thus be suppressed in a state of nature. The wattles, also, vary much in size, being small in Malays and some other breeds; in certain Polish sub-breeds they are replaced by a great tuft of feathers called a beard.
The hackles do not differ much in the various breeds, but are short and stiff in Malays, and absent in Hennies. As in some orders male birds display extraordinarily-shaped feathers, such as naked shafts with discs at the end, etc., the following case may be worth giving. In the wild Gallus bankiva and in our domestic fowls, the barbs which arise from each side of the extremities of the hackles are naked or not clothed with barbules, so that they resemble bristles; but Mr. Brent sent me some scapular hackles from a young Birchen Duckwing Game cock, in which the naked barbs became densely re-clothed with barbules towards their tips; so that these tips, which were dark coloured with a metallic lustre, were separated from the lower parts by a symmetrically-shaped transparent zone formed of the naked portions of the barbs.