254 CUEASSOW DINNER. [CHAP. n. 



now living in captivity, both on the Continent and in 

 England, in greater numbers, and under more favour- 

 able conditions, than ever they were before ; and yet the 

 much-desired solution of the problem, " To rear Curas- 

 sows and Guans as poultry," remains just as far from our 

 discovery as it was 30 or 40 years ago. We may seem 

 to speak in rather sweeping terms; but all the Cra- 

 cida3 may fairly be described in general language as far 

 as regards the difficulty of naturalising them here. 



We have Temminck's book "(from which most people's 

 notions on the subject are borrowed, either at first or 

 second hand) now before us. We remarked in the 

 foregoing chapter that M. Ameshoff s famous Curassow 

 dinner, at which he was present when a child (dans 

 mon enfance], which has been made so much of, was 

 nothing but a dinner of display, something like the 

 dishes of Peacocks' brains and Nightingales' tongues 

 served up in ancient Rome ; and that it is no more 

 to be taken as a proof of the ease with which he pro- 

 pagated the CracidaB, than is the eating of the rare 

 birds and animals in the Jardin des Plantes by the 

 insurgents during some of the late Parisian outbreaks, 

 to be set down in history as an evidence that such birds 

 and beasts bred so freely at that time in France as to 

 furnish an item of the popular dietary. 



Temminck* says, " I have observed the Curassows 

 in many menageries in Holland, where they were 

 scarcely less familiar than the Turkeys, the Peafowl, 

 and the Guineafowl [which is exactly their true charac- 

 ter in menageries in England]. I attribute their in- 

 fecundity in the state of domesticity to the little special 



* Vol. ii. p. 457. 



