“Soliciti canes canibusve sagacior anser.” 
  OVID, Met. xi. 399.

[Footnote 1:  “And hereupon did Rome fall almost into the superstition of the AEgyptians that worship birds and beasts, for they henceforth kept a holy day which they call the goose’s feast.”—­AUGUSTINE, Civitas Dei, &c. book ii. ch. 22:  Englished by F.H.  Icond. 1610.]

[Footnote 2:  This appears from a line of Lucretius: 

  “Romulidarum arcis servator candidus anser.”
  De Rer.  Nat. I. iv. 687.]

[Footnote 3:  SIR GARDNER WILKINSON’S Manners and Customs, &c., 2nd Ser. pl. 31, fig. 2, vol. i. p. 312; vol. ii. p. 227.  Mr. Birch of the British Museum informs me that throughout the ritual or hermetic books of the ancient Egyptians a mystical notion is attached to the goose as one of the creatures into which the dead had to undergo a transmigration.  That it was actually worshipped is attested by a sepulchral tablet of the 26th dynasty, about 700 B.C., in which it is figured standing on a small chapel over which are the hieroglyphic words, “The good goose greatly beloved;” and on the lower part of the tablet the dedicator makes an offering of fire and water to “Ammon and the Goose.”—­Revue Archaeo., vol. ii. pl. 27.]

[Footnote 4:  HORAPOLLO, Hieroglyphica, lib. i. 23.]

[Footnote 5:  AELIAN, Nat.  Hist., lib. v. c. 29, 30, 50.  AElian says that the Romans in recognition of the superior vigilance of the goose on the occasion of the assault on the Capitol, instituted a procession in the Forum in honour of the goose, whose watchfulness was incorruptible; but held an annual denunciation of the inferior fidelity of the dogs, which allowed themselves to be silenced by meat flung to them by the Gauls.—­Nat.  Hist. lib. xii. ch. xxxiii.]

The feeling appears to have spread westward at an early period; the ancient Britons, according to Caesar, held it impious to eat the flesh of the goose[1], and the followers of the first crusade which issued from England, France, and Flanders, adored a goat and a goose, which they believed to be filled by the Holy Spirit.[2]

[Footnote 1:  “Anserem gustare fas non patant.”—­CAESAR, Bell Gall., lib. v. ch xii.]

[Footnote 2:  MILL’S Hist. of the Crusades, vol. i. ch. ii. p. 75.  Forster has suggested that it was a species of goose (which annually migrates from the Black Sea towards the south) that fed the Israelites in the desert of Sinai, and that the “winged fowls” meant by the word salu, which has been heretofore translated “quails,” were “red geese,” resembling those of Egypt and India.  He renders one of the mysterious inscriptions which abound in the Wady Mokatteb (the Valley of Writings), “the red geese ascend from the sea,—­lusting the people eat to repletion;” thus presenting a striking concurrence with the passage in Numb. xi. 31, “there went forth a wind from the Lord and brought quails (salu) from the sea.”—­FORSTER’S One Primeval Language, vol. i. p. 90.]