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!]

[Footnote 181: Reading _ad infirma crura_. This practice is explained
more at length by Columella (VIII, 2, 3) who specifies the spurs,
_calcaribus inustis_.

Buffon, who describes a 'practice of trimming the combs of capons,
adds (V, 302) an interesting account of an experiment which he says he
had made "une espece de greffe animale": after trimming the comb of
a growing cockerel his budding spurs were cut out and grafted on the
roots of the comb, where they took root and flourished, growing to a
length of two and a half inches, in some cases curving forward like
the horns of a ram, and in others turning back like those of a goat.]

[Footnote 182: The dusting yard which Varro here describes was in the
open, but Columella (VIII, 3) advises what modern poultry farmers
pride themselves