FOOTNOTES
[1502] The principal works in which information may be found on this subject, are Perrault in Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences depuis 1666 jusqu’à 1699.—Traité de la Police, par De la Mare, ii. p. 726.—Buffon, Hist. Nat.—Pallas, Spicilegia Zoologica, fascic. iv. p. 10.—Pennant, in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. lxxi. part i. p. 72.—Pennant’s Arctic Zoology, vol. ii.—Miscellanies by Daines Barrington. London, 1781, 4to, p. 127.
[1503] Athenæus, Deip. lib. xiv. p. 655. Most of those passages of the ancients in which this fowl is mentioned have been collected by Gesner, in his Histor. Avium, p. 461, and by Aldrovandus in his Ornithologia, lib. xiii. p. 18. When we consider the feathers as delineated by Perrault, we shall find the comparison of Clytus more intelligible than it has appeared to many commentators.
[1504] Plin. Strabo. The following passage of the Periplus Scylacis, p. 122, which I have never found cited in the history of the meleagrides, is worthy of remark. This geographer, speaking of a lake in the Carthaginian marshes, says, “Circa lacum nascitur arundo, cyperus, stœbe et juncus. Ibi meleagrides aves sunt; alibi vero nusquam nisi inde exportatæ.”
[1505] Columella, viii. 2, 2, p. 634.
[1506] I have here quoted nothing more than what I thought requisite to prove that the meleagrides of the ancients were our Guinea fowls, because I had no intention of treating fully on a subject which has been handled by so many others; and because I had only to show that they were not turkeys. Had not this been the case, it would have been necessary for me to collect into one point of view everything that the ancients have said of these fowls, with the words used by the different writers. It may however be said, that by this mode of examining a disputed point, a mode indeed practised by many, the reader may be led to an ill-founded approbation, because what is not agreeable to the author’s assertion may be easily concealed. But this observation is not applicable to me; for I confess that I do not know with certainty whether the Guinea fowls are as careless of their young as the meleagrides are said to have been; whether their cry, which I have often enough heard, and which is indeed unpleasant, agrees with the κακκάζειν of Pollux, v. § 90; and whether the ἀλεκτρυόνες μεγέθει μέγιστοι, mentioned in Ælian’s Hist. Animal, xvi. 2, belong to the Guinea fowls, or, as Pennant will have it, to the Pavones bicalcarati.
[1507] Kennet’s Parochial Antiquities, p. 287. The meleagrides also, which Volateran saw at Rome in 1510, were of the same kind.
[1508] Sommario dell’ Ind. Occid. cap. 3. In the third volume of the Collection of Voyages by Ramusio, Oviedo describes them with great minuteness, which it is unlikely he would have done had these fowls been so well known in Europe as Barrington thinks they were.
[1509] The peacock pheasant of Guiana, Bancroft; Quirissai or Curassao, Brown; the crested curassow, Latham.
[1510] Hist. de Mexico, p. 343.
[1511] Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 274.
[1512] Pennant quotes also De Bry, but that author I never consulted.
[1513] “Huexolot gallus est Indicus, quem gallipavonem quidam vocant, noruntque omnes.”—Thesaur. Rerum Med. Novæ Hispaniæ, in Append. Barrington remarks that Fernandez would not have said quem norunt omnes, had these animals been first made known from America; for Mexico was discovered in 1519, and Fernandez appears to have written about 1576. This reason, however, appears to me of little weight; especially as it is certain that these fowls, like many other productions which excited universal curiosity, were soon everywhere common. Besides, it is not certain that these words were really written by Fernandez.
[1514] An English translation of Ciesa’s Voyage may be found in Stevens’s New Collection of Voyages and Travels.
[1515] Vol. ii. part ii. p. 65, 85, 114. Leri seems also to have found them in Brazil, see Laet, in his Novus Orbis, Lugd. Bat. 1633, fol. p. 557. As his description, however, is not clear, and as the diligent Marggraf does not mention it among the animals of Brazil, this information appears to be very uncertain.
[1516] Kalm’s Reise, ii. p. 352.
[1517] Tour in the U. S. of America, by J. F. D. Smyth, 1784, 2 vols. 8vo.
[1518] Crescentio lived about the year 1280. [His work Ruralium Commodorum lib. xii. was first printed in 1471.]
[1519] Opera di M. Bartolomeo Scappi, Venet. 1570, 4to. The copy in the library of our university contains eighteen copper-plates, which represent different kitchen utensils, and various operations of cookery. Among the former is a smoke-jack, molinella a fumo. I am inclined to think that turkeys at this period were very little reared by farmers; for I do not find any mention of them in Trattato dell’ Agricoltura, di M. Affrico Clemente, Padovano, in Venetia 1572, 12mo; though the author treats of all other domestic birds.
[1520] It is certain that the name does not occur in the List of archbishop Nevil’s feast, nor is it mentioned in the Earl of Northumberland’s Household-book, so late as the year 1512. See Latham’s Birds.
[1521] This order, which is worthy of notice, may be found in the Archæologia, vol. iii. p. 157.
[1522] Anderson, Hist. Commerce. Hakluyt, ii. p. 165, gives the year 1532; and in Barnaby Googe’s Art of Husbandry, the first edition, printed in 1614, as well as in several German books, the year 1530 is mentioned.
[1523] Dugdale’s Origines Juridiciales, 1671, p. 135.
[1524] Pennant quotes the following rhyme from Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Husbandry:—
Beefe, mutton and porke, shred pies of the best,
Pig, veale, goose and capon and turkie well drest;
Cheese, apples and nuts, jolie carols to heare,
As then in the countrie, is counted good cheare.
These lines he places in the year 1585, in which the edition he quotes was printed; but as there was an edition in 1557, a question arises whether they are to be found there also. [They are not there.—Ed.]
[1525] Déscription du Duché de Bourgogne, par MM. Courtépée et Beguillet, Dijon, 1775, 8vo, vol. i. p. 193, and in Déscription Générale et Particulière de la France, Paris, 1781, fol. In the Description of Burgundy, p. 196, the following passage occurs:—“C’est sous le règne de Philippe le Hardi, que les gelines d’Inde furent apportées d’Artois à Dijon en 1385; ce qui montre la fausseté de la tradition, qui en attribue l’apport à l’Amiral Chabot au seizième siècle. Cent ans avant Chabot, Jaques Cœur en avoit transporté de Turquie en son château de Beaumont en Gatinois, et Americ Vespuce en Portugal.”—What impudence to make such an assertion without any proof!
[1526] See the works which give a particular account of this Jacques Cœur, and which have been quoted by Meusel in Algemeine Welt Historie, xxxvii. p. 615.
[1527] La Chorographie ou Déscription de Provence, par Honoré Bouche, Aix, 1664, 2 vols. fol. ii. p. 479.
[1528] Essai sur l’Histoire de Provence, à Marseille, 1785. 2 vols. 4to.
[1529] De Re Cibaria, lib. xv. cap. 73, p. 632. This work was first published by the author in 1560, but it was written thirty years before. Turkeys, therefore, at any rate, must have been in France in 1630.
[1530] Histoire de la Vie Privée des Français, par Le Grand d’Aussy, i. p. 292.
[1531] Anderson. Keysler’s Travels.
[1532] This is related by Le Grand, from the Journal of L’Etoile.
[1533] “On lit, dans l’Année Littéraire, que Boileau, encore enfant, jouant dans une cour, tomba. Dans sa chute, sa jaquette se retrousse; un dindon lui donne plusieurs coups de bec sur une partie très-délicate. Boileau en fut toute sa vie incommodé; et de-là, peut-être, cette sévérité de mœurs, ... sa satyre contre les femmes..... Peut-être son antipathie contre les dindons occasionna-t-elle l’aversion secrette qu’il eut toujours pour les Jésuites, qui les ont apportés en France.”—Helvetius de l’Esprit. Amst. 1759, 12mo. i. p. 288.
[1534] De Re Rustica. Spiræ Nemet. 1595, 8vo, lib. iv. p. 640.
[1535] Hausbuch, vol. iv. Wittenberg, 1611, 4to, p. 499.
[1536] Œkonomische Nachrichten der Schlesischen Gesellschaft, 1773, p. 306. For the festival of the university of Wittenberg, in 1602, fifteen Indian or Turkey fowls were purchased at the rate of a florin each. They were in part dressed with lemon-sauce.
[1537] Bell’s Travels, i. p. 128.
[1538] “Turkeys (poulets d’Inde) are there foreign and scarce birds. The Armenians, about thirty years ago, carried from Constantinople to Ispahan a great number of them, which they presented to the king as a rarity; but it is said that the Persians, not knowing the method of breeding them, gave in return the care of them to these people, and assigned a different house for each. The Armenians, however, finding them troublesome and expensive, suffered them almost all to perish. I saw some which were reared in the territory of Ispahan, four leagues from the city, by the Armenian peasants; but they were not numerous. Some imagine that these birds were brought from the East Indies; but this is so far from being the case, that there are none of them in that part of the world. They must have come from the West Indies, although they are called cocqs d’Inde because, being larger than common fowls, they in that resemble the Indian fowls, which are of much greater size than the common fowls of other countries.”—Voyages de Chardin, iv. p. 84.
[1539] Hakluyt, ii. p. 825.
[1540] Rélation Universelle d’Afrique. Lyon 1688, iv. p. 426.
[1541] Perroniana, p. 67.
[1542] Leland’s Itinerary. Oxford, 1744, vol. vi. p. 5.
[1543] Minshew’s Guide into Tongues, 1617, fol.