[Footnote 176:  It probably will not comfort the ultimate consumer who holds in such odium the celebrated “Schedule K” of the Payne-Aldrich tariff, to realize that the American wool grower puts no higher value on his sheep than did his Roman ancestor, as revealed by this quotation from the stock yards of Varro’s time.  It is interesting, however, to the breeder to know that a good price for wool has always stimulated the production of the best stock.  Strabo says that the wool of Turdetania in Spain was so celebrated in the generation after Varro that a ram of the breed (the ancestors of the modern Merino) fetched a talent, say $1,200; a price which may be compared with that of the prize ram recently sold in England for export to the Argentine for as much as a thousand pounds sterling, and considered a good commercial investment at that.  Doubtless the market for Rosean mules comforted Axius in his investment of the equivalent of L400 in a breeding jack.]

[Footnote 177:  In feudal times the right to maintain a dove cote was the exclusive privilege of the lord of the manor.  According to their immemorial custom, which Varro notices, the pigeons preyed on the neighbourhood crops and were detested by the community in consequence.  During the French revolution they were one of the counts in the indictment of the land-owning aristocracy, and in the event the pigeons as well as their owners had the sins of their forefathers justly visited upon them.  The American farmer who has a pigeon-keeping neighbour and is restrained by the pettiness of the annoyance from making a point on their trespasses, feels something of the blind and impotent wrath of the French peasant against the whole pigeon family.]

[Footnote 178:  It appears that the Romans actually hired men to chew the food intended for cramming birds, so as to relieve the unhappy victims even of such exercise as they might get from assimilating their diet.  Columella (VII, 10) in discussing the diet of thrushes deprecates this practice, sagely saying that the wages of the chewers are out of proportion to the benefit obtained, and that any way the chewers swallow a good part of what they are given to macerate.

The typical tramp of the comic papers who is forever looking for occupation without work might well envy these Roman professional chewers.  Not even Dr. Wiley’s “poison squad” employed to test food products could compare with them.]

[Footnote 179:  These prices of $10 and $50 and even $80 a pair for pigeons, large as they seem, were surpassed under the Empire.  Columella says (VIII, 8):  “That excellent author, M. Varro, tells us that in his more austere time it was not unusual for a pair of pigeons to sell for a thousand sesterces, a price at which the present day should blush, if we may believe the report that men have been found to pay for a pair as much as four thousand nummi.” ($200.)]

[Footnote 180:  The market for chickens and eggs in the United States would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!).  It is solemnly recorded that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred eggs a year!]