[Footnote 186:  Many thousands of geese used to be driven every year to Rome from the land of the Morini in Northern Gaul, but the Germans are the modern consumers.  A British consular report says that in addition to the domestic supply a special “goose train” of from fifteen to forty cars is received daily in Berlin from Russia.  It would seem that the goose that lays the golden egg has emigrated to Muscovy.  Buffon says that the introduction of the Virginia turkey into Europe drove the goose off the tables of all civilized peoples.]

[Footnote 187:  Columella (VIII, 14) repeats this myth, but Aristotle (H.A. V, 2, 9) says that geese bathe after breeding.  Buffon gives a Gallic touch, “ces oiseaux preludent aux actes de l’amour en allant d’abord s’egayer dans l’eau.”]

[Footnote 188:  Reading seris.  It is the Cichorium endivia of Linnaeus.  Cf.  Pliny (H.N. XX, 32.)]

[Footnote 189:  Varro does not mention it, but the Romans knew and prized pate de foie gras under the name ficatum, which indicates that they produced it by cramming their geese with a diet of figs.  Cf.  Horace’s verse “pinguibus et ficis pastum iecur anseris albi.”

In Toulouse, whence now comes the best of this dainty of the epicure, the geese are crammed daily with a dough of corn meal mixed with the oil of poppies, fed through a tin funnel, which is introduced into the esophagus of the unhappy bird.  At the end of a month the stertorous breathing of the victim proclaims the time of sacrifice to Apicius.  The liver is expected to weigh a kilogram, (say two pounds), while at least two kilograms of fat are saved in addition, to garnish the family plat of vegetables during the remainder of the year.]

[Footnote 190:  Reading foeles, which Keller, in his account of the fauna of ancient Italy in the Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies, identifies with Martes vulgaris.  Sir Anthony Fitzherbert calls them fullymartes.  It does not appear that the Romans had in Varro’s time brought from Egypt our household cat, F. maniculata.  They used weasels and tame snakes for catching mice.]

[Footnote 191:  Darwin (Animals and Plants, I, 8) cites this passage and argues that Varro’s advice to cover the duck yard with netting to keep the ducks from flying out is evidence that in Varro’s time ducks were not entirely domesticated, and hence that the modern domestic duck is the same species as the wild duck.  It may be noted, however, that Varro gives the same advice about netting the chicken yard, having said that chickens had been domesticated from the beginning of time.]

[Footnote 192:  The ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinii is now known as Corneto.  The wild sheep which Lippinus there kept in his game preserves were probably the mouflon which are still hunted in Sardinia and Corsica, though they may have been the Phrygian wild sheep (Aegoceros argali) which Varro mentions in Book II.  Pliny (H.N. VIII, 211) says that this Lippinus was the first of the Romans to keep wild animals enclosed; that he established his preserves shortly before the Civil Wars, and that he soon had imitators.]