Belon was a great observer of all the birds of prey, and appears to have taken many notes of their habits while living near the Monts d’Or, in Auvergne, under the protection of M. Duprat, the Bishop of Clermont. It was there he learnt the fact about the peasantry eating the goivan, called also the boudrée, which he thus describes: “There is not a peasant in the Limagne (a great plain) of Auvergne who does not know the goivan, and how to capture him with traps baited with frogs, or with lime, but more commonly with snares. He is taken principally in the winter, when he is very good to eat, for he is so fat that no other bird comes near him in that respect. The peasants lard or boil him, and find his flesh quite as good as that of a hen. This eagle eats rats, mice, frogs, lizards, snails, caterpillars, and sometimes serpents.” That there may be no doubt about the last-named viand being food for eagles, one of Peter Belon’s lively portraitures follows the statement, in which a goivan is depicted in the act of dining on a serpent, twisted into a figure of eight (as, well he might be), and a number of astonished frogs and fishes scurrying away for dear life,--all save one philosophical member of the tadpole family, who, sitting on the tumultuous waves of an adjacent ditch, calmly contemplates the scene. It is observable throughout the plates in Belon’s work that the smaller quadrupeds endure the infliction of being devoured alive with far greater resignation than the Reptilia. I have before me at this moment the portrait of a rabbit, on whose back a buzzard is standing as if in the act of going to sing, while the long-eared animal on which he has pounced seems to apprehend his fate no more than if he were a music-stand. A mouse in the claws of a speckled magpie, puts on, in another plate, an air of equal indifference.