As the chicken issues naturally from the egg, so dining upon the one is the regular sequence to breakfasting on the other. The younger your pullet, says Belon, the easier it is of digestion, though he allows you occasionally to eat an elderly male bird, when prescribed medicinally (hormis le coq, qui est souvêt pris pour medicine). “Roasted or grilled fowls are generally the most savoury; those which are boiled furnish more humid nourishment to the body. The first are eaten hot, the last cold.” This rule, however, does not, he tells us, always hold good: “Because, if any one writing on the quality of the flesh of birds, happened to be in a country where the people fed on a particular kind not eaten elsewhere, and a male bird already old and tough were offered him (avenait qu’on luy presentast de quelque oyseau des-ia viel et endurcy), he ought not to conclude that its flesh is necessarily fibrous and hard.” With all respect for the opinion of honest Peter Belon, I should be inclined to think that a tough old cock, whatever his nation, was somewhat difficult of digestion. I have a very vivid recollection of a fowl of this sort at a certain hotel in Abbeville, where nothing else was to be had for dinner, which the waiter assured me was not to be surpassed in tenderness; a quality he might have displayed towards his family when alive, but which certainly did not belong to him after he was roasted. It is, perhaps, on the tolerant principle of respecting other people’s prejudices (I can account for Belon’s conclusion no other way), that he does not exclude even birds of prey from good men’s feasts. “We know by experience,” he observes (not his own experience, I hope), “what has taken place in Crete, where the young ones of the vulture which have fallen from their rocky nests near Voulèsmeni, have been proved at least as good eating as a fine capon. And although some of the inhabitants (the greater part, I should imagine) think that the old birds are not good to eat, because they feed on carrion, the fact is otherwise; for good falconers say that the hawk, vulture, and falcon are excellent meat, and being roasted or boiled, like poultry, are found to be well-tasted and tender. (Fancy a tender vulture!) We constantly see, if any of these birds kill themselves, or break a limb in hunting game, that the falconers do not hesitate to dress them for the table.” In Auvergne, he adds, the peasants of the Limagne, and in the mountains, too, eat the flesh of the goivan, a species of eagle; so that it may be concluded that birds of prey, whether old or young, are tender,--an inference which I presume to doubt. One saving clause Peter Belon has, which has at all times done good service. If people generally are not in the habit of eating kites, owls, and so forth, there are some who do: “tastes merely differ”--(les appetits des hommes ne se ressemblent en aucune manière).