H 



CHAPTER IV 



I 



THE TURKEY HISTORIC 



AVING disposed of such records as we 

 have of the extinct ancestors of the 

 American turkeys — the so-to-speak 

 meleagrine records — we can now pass to what 

 is, comparatively speaking, the modern history 

 of these famous birds, although some of this 

 history is already several centuries old. 



We have seen in the foregoing chapter that 

 all the described fossil species of turkeys have 

 been restricted to the genus Meleagris, and this 

 is likewise the case with the existing species and 

 subspecies. Right here I may say that the 

 word Meleagris is Greek as well as Latin, and 

 means a guinea-fowl. This is due to the fact 

 that when turkeys were first described and 

 written about they were, by several authors of 

 the early times, strangely mixed up with those 

 African forms, and the two were not entirely 



