342 [Assembly 



domestic, and confiding by the cares and wisdom of man. [They 

 were all created some time before man. Vide Genesis — H. 

 Meigs.] The proposition assumes that the Almighty Creator 

 could not, or would not, make a tame animal. 



We, in these latter days, can make neither the shy bustard 

 nor the gentle guan available in our poultry yards. We cannot 

 harness the zebra, tempting as is his pattern, to our Lord Mayor's 

 coach — nor induce the jackal to point and set, so as to become 

 Gumming Gordon's, instead of Zao's provider. Bnt these har- 

 rassed, toiling, wayworn patriarchs could train for us the horse, 

 the dog, the fowl. 



Mr. Sundevall says the Bengal jungle fowl is, beyond all ques- 

 tion, the exclusive aboriginal stock from which the whole of our 

 domestic varieties of common poultry have descended. 



Sundevall is quite wrong in stating that any Hindoos ever 

 breed fowls ; the mere touch of one, or of an egg, is pollution 

 even to the lowest caste of them. 



Aldovandrus devotes some fifty pages of his large folio to poul- 

 try. He becomes eloquent when he handles the tisus in cibo — 

 their uses on the dinner table. " By this, almost alone, are we 

 aided on the sudden arrival of friends or guests. To this we 

 ought to refer the chief elegancies of our table, whether it be 

 sumptuous, moderate, or sparing." Galen says, that if the cocks 

 are yet tender, namely, cockrels, their flesh is to be enumerated 

 among the fleshes which afford the middle quality as to making 

 lean and fat ; for it is easily digested ; it generates laudable blood; 

 it conciliates aflection ; it agrees with every kind of tempera- 

 ment, especially if the birds are moderately fat, a?id have not ytt 

 crowed. 



The ancients loved fat hens. Pliny says that the Fat Hen 

 Law of C. Fannius was passed eleven years before the third 

 Punic war, but a mode of evasion was found out. That law for- 

 bade serving at table more than one single hen, and that not fat- 

 ted. The Gauls thought the rumps of fowls were military meat, 

 and called their veteran soldiers uropagiorum voratores — rump 

 devourers. 



