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. Principles and practice of poultry culture . Poultry. Fig. 449. White Polish Bantam cock^ literature to dwarf races of fowls in Europe centuries ago. The name has been supposed to come from the province of Bantam, in Java, whence, it is said, were imported the first bantams to attract attention in Eng- land. Neither record nor reliable tradition gives any account of such importation. It was apparently assumed in order to connect dwarf fowls as a class with some place in Asia, at the time when it was fashionable to give Asiatic names to races of fowls. The popular name for a dwarf fowl is (an
. Principles and practice of poultry culture . Poultry. Fig. 449. White Polish Bantam cock^ literature to dwarf races of fowls in Europe centuries ago. The name has been supposed to come from the province of Bantam, in Java, whence, it is said, were imported the first bantams to attract attention in Eng- land. Neither record nor reliable tradition gives any account of such importation. It was apparently assumed in order to connect dwarf fowls as a class with some place in Asia, at the time when it was fashionable to give Asiatic names to races of fowls. The popular name for a dwarf fowl is (and un- doubtedly was long before Asiatic fowls came to Europe) "banty," which probably comes from the Gaelic banna, a jot, the small- est portion of anything, and from which were derived the Gaelic bean, bian, little, small.^ Economically bantams are of little impor- tance. As layers they are, as a rule, much inferior to large fowls. Only the largest spec- imens of the largest varieties are desirable for poultry. Most varieties are rather delicate, especially when young. Common bantams — that is, those of no par- ticular breeding — are kept mostly as chil- dren's pets. Standard-bred bantams are kept by fanciers to whom the type appeals and who take pleasure in working out the breed- ing problems that it presents. Dwarf t\pes of nearly all races of fowls have been pro- duced, and there are a few quite unlike the large types. Singularly, types unpopular in large fowls are very likely to be popular in bantams, while the dwarf types of popular fowls attract comparatively little notice. The 1 See Williams's Lexicon Cornu-Brittanicum, a Dictionary of the Gaelic Lan- guage of Ancient Cornwall. ^ Photograph by Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original Robinson, John H. (John Henry), 1863-
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Keywords: ., bookauthorrobinson, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookyear1912