The Venetian nobles amuse themselves differently--not with kites, but cormorants. When the weather is calm, they go out on the lagoons in light boots, two or three dozen in company, each boat being rowed by six men, and pulled very swiftly. Having surrounded the cormorant (like French huntsmen with a fox, to prevent him from getting away and giving them a run), he cannot rise in the air (why not?), but dives under the water, and every time he shows his head above the surface, the noblemen let fly at him with their cross-bows, till at last he is thoroughly done up, is half-suffocated, and gives in. “It is a fine sight to behold this sport (c’est un beau spectacle de voir un tel deduit), and also is to see a cormorant having caught a tolerably-sized eel, which he tries to swallow, but has to fight a long time with it before he can get it down.” The cormorants themselves are, oddly enough, not thought good eating by the common people, who say of them that they are “a dish for the devil” (qui voudroit jestoyer le diable, il luy faudroit doñer de tels oyseaux); but Belon does not think them so bad as they say (toute fois ne sont si mauvais qu’on crië). The stork, unfortunately, did not, when Belon flourished, enjoy the same immunity; for though he admits that the Romans despised them at table, he says, “now they are looked upon as a royal dish.” He moreover tells us that the gizzard of a stork is an antidote to poison, and a remedy against squinting (le gesier de la cigogne est bon contre les venins et qui en aura mangé ne sera lousche en sa vie)! It appears also that even the ostrich, which can digest iron, is itself digested by Libyan gastronomers, who eat the flesh and sell the feathers. This tendency to discover what birds are most eatable, is manifested throughout the volume of Peter Belon. Arriving at the noble Alectrion or Rooster of the United States, he cites the following recipe, from Dioscorides, for the concoction of cock-broth. “Take a fine strong old bird, and having properly trussed him, stuff him well with roots of fern, the seed of chartamus (whatever that may be), salt of mercury, and soldanella (a purgative sea-weed), and, having sewn him up, boil him well down.” A potage this, which bears some resemblance to “the sillakickaby of the ancients,” described in Peregrine Pickle, and, I should think, nearly as agreeable.