PEOVINCETOWN. 
199 
also sometimes lick out all the soft part of a cod on the 
flakes. This he would have me believe was the foun¬ 
dation of this fish-storj. 
It has been a constant traveller’s tale and perhaps 
slander, now for thousands of years, the Latins and 
Greeks have repeated it, that this or that nation feeds 
its cattle, or horses, or sheep, on fish, as may be seen in 
(Elian and Pliny, but in the Journal of Nearchus, who 
was Alexander’s admiral, and made a voyage from the 
Indus to the Euphrates three hundred and twenty six 
years before Christ, it is said that the inhabitants of a 
portion of the intermediate coast, whom he called 
Icthyophagi or Fish-eaters, not only ate fishes raw and 
also dried and pounded in a whale’s vertebra for a mor¬ 
tar and made into a paste, but gave them to their cattle, 
there being no grass on the coast; and several modern 
travellers, — Braybosa, Niebuhr, and others make the 
same report. Therefore in balancing the evidence I am 
still in doubt about the Provincetown cows. As for 
other domestic animals. Captain King in his continuation 
of Captain Cook’s Journal in 1779, says of the dogs of 
Kamtschatka, “ Their food in the winter consists entirely 
of the head, entrails, and backbones of salmon, which 
are put aside and dried for that purpose ; and with this 
diet they are fed but sparingly.” (Cook’s Journal, 
Vol. YII. p. 315.) 
As we are treating of fishy matters, let me insert 
what Pliny says, that “ the commanders of the fleets of 
Alexander the Great have related that the Gedrosi, who 
dwell on the banks of the river Arabis, are in the habit 
of making the doors of their houses with the jaw-bones 
of fishes, and raftering the roofs with their bones.” Strabo 
tells the same of the Ichthyophagi. “ Hardoiiin re- 
