332 APPENDIX. 



The currently, and as I believe correctly, accepted view that the 

 common fowl, Gallus gallinaceus, is never mentioned by, and may with 

 some considerable likelihood be supposed to have been unknown to the 

 Old Testament writers and to Homer and Hesiod also, is confirmed by 

 the negative evidence of the neolithic interments in this country 1 . 



literature which bear on the question of the recent date of the domestication of the 

 bee in these islands. In the Life of St. Cadoc (Bibl. Cotton. Vesp. A. xiv.) it is stated 

 that he chose a solitary place for his monastery, having seen 'aprum sub arbore jacen- 

 tem, apes venientes et intrantes in cavam arborem.' In the first Life of St. David 

 we read that his father was told by an angel that be would find gifts by the river 

 Teivy ; a certain stag ; ■ apumque examen in arbore positum,' &c. And in the second 

 Life of the same saint there is a curious legend of a swarm of bees settling on a ship 

 going to Ireland, the bees following St. David from place to place ; and it is added 

 that ' Hibernia in qua nunquam usque ad illud tempus apes vivere poterant mellis 

 fertilitate ditatur.* See also Lanigan, ' Eccl. Hist.,' iii. 82-84 ; 'Life of St. Molaga,' 

 cap. 22 ; ' Notes on Irish Architecture,' by the Earl of Dunraven, i. pp. 63, 64. 



1 It is a little difficult to reconcile the passages which stand in our authorised version 

 of the Old Testament (1 Kings x. 22 ; 2 Chron. ix. 21), to the effect that a navv of 

 Tarshish brought ' once in three years gold and silver, ivory, and apes and peacocks ' 

 to king Solomon, with the view held, I should suppose, by most modern Hebraists, as 

 by Bochart (' Hierozoicon,' ed. 1682, lib. i. cap. xvi. p. in), that when the Latin ' in- 

 terpretes multa prophetarum loca ad gallinaceum genus referunt,' it is, in the words 

 of the writer just cited, ' conjecturis non satis certis.' For the servants of Hiram and 

 Solomon would have found it at least as easy and profitable to import Gallus bankiva 

 and indeed Sw indicus as apes and peacocks. But as against this utilitarian considera- 

 tion we may suggest that the words of Caesar quoted in the text render it not wholly 

 improbable that to the Tyrian sailors the fowl may have been a forbidden food, as it 

 was to many other races ; and as, in fact, Sus was to their Hebrew comrades on those 

 ships of Tarshish. Antiquaries who hold that it was from intercourse with Phoenician 

 rather than with Etruscan traders that the Britons learnt certain other things will 

 think this an argument in their favour. A long sea- voyage however, as the absence 

 of the fowl from New Zealand in the time of Captain Cook shows us, made the intro- 

 duction of domestic animals very difficult to such navigators. And the history of the 

 words makes me suspect that it was by the way of Babylon rather than that of the 

 Red Sea that the peacock itself, to say nothing of the common fowl, the irepaiKos opvis, 

 found its main route of immigration into Palestine and Greece. For, duiing the 

 Babylonish captivity the word tukhi-im, the Hebrew representative of the Malabar 

 name for the peacock, had become obsolete, and, like many other Hebrew words, was 

 nearly forgotten in the time of the LXX, who have given what the Targum, using a 

 word, tavass, almost identical with raws, holds to be its true meaning, only once and 

 in a various reading (Cod. Alex.), real rawvvv. And Minayeff (cit. Caldwell, ' Dra- 

 vidian Grammar,' ed. 1875, p. 92) has discovered in the Buddhistical writings that 

 the ancient Indian merchants took peacocks to Babylon, Probably the fowl was 

 carried with them. 



As regards the absence of any mention of the common fowl in the Homeric poems, 

 I have been told that an eminent and voluminous writer upon this subject is of opinion 

 that in the line, II. vi. 513, 



1tvx*<ri van<paiva)V, ws t ijXtKTMp, ePc&rjKec, 

 we have Paris, in his ill-supported character of warrior, compared to this bird. A 

 somewhat similar passage in the Proverbs of Solomon (xxx. 31) has been similarly 



