When full-grown geese were intended to be fattened, the custom was, to confine them in dark and extremely warm cells.[1102] Their food was scientifically varied and regulated, proceeding from less to more nutritious, until they were judged fit for the table. At first their diet consisted of a preparation composed of two parts _polenta_, and four parts bran boiled in water. Of this they were permitted to eat as much as they pleased three times a day, and once again at midnight, while water was furnished them in abundance. When they had continued on this regimen for some time, they were indulged with a more luxurious table,—nothing less than the most exquisite dried figs, which, being chopped small, and dissolved in water, were served up as a sort of jelly for twenty days, after which the pampered animal itself was ready for the spit. ----- Footnote 1102: The Quintilian Brothers, ap. Geop. xiv. 22. For the fate of these illustrious authors, Maximus and Condianus, see Gibbon, i. 142. “Sint calido et tenebroso loco: quæres ad creandas adipes multum conferunt.” Colum. viii. 14. ----- Occasionally that delicate and humane device, for the practice of which Germany has, in modern times, obtained so enviable a celebrity, of enlarging preternaturally the dimensions of the liver, was resorted to by the ancients,[1103] whose mode of proceeding was as follows: during five-and-twenty days, being cooped up as before in a place of high temperature, the geese were fed with wheat and barley steeped in water, the former of which fattened, while the latter rendered their flesh delicately white. For the next five days certain cakes or balls, denominated collyria,[1104] the composition of which is not exactly known, were given them at the rate of seven per day, after which the number was gradually augmented to fifteen, which constituted their whole allowance for other twenty days. To this succeeded the most extraordinary dish of all, consisting of bolusses of leavened dough, steeped in a warm decoction of mallows, by which they were puffed up for four days. Their drink, meanwhile, was still more delicious than their food, being nothing less than hydromel,[1105] or water mingled with honey. During the last six days dried figs, chopped fine, were added to their leaven, and the process being thus brought to a conclusion, the gourmands for whom they were intended, feasted on the tenderest geese and the largest livers in the world. It should be added, however, that before being cooked the liver was thrown into a basin of warm water, which the _artistes_ several times changed. Geese, adds the ingenious gastronomer to whom we are indebted for these details, are, both for flesh and liver, much inferior to ganders. The Greeks did not, however, like the Romans and the moderns, select young geese for this species of culinary apotheosis, but birds of a mature age and of the largest size, from two to four years old, which only proves the superior strength and