[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.