[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.