050v - - - - - Little Birds
Buntings sing during the night if they are left in the cool open air, but they are better suited to fattening for fine tables than for singing. Chaffinches are prone to blindness, and their eyes swell at the beginning of August. Goldfinches love lettuce seeds, and you can catch them in gardens on seedy lettuce using two lime—twigs. But because such a daily fayre would be too expensive for them, they are usually fed with hemp—seed. The owsell is purged with a spider, which you must give it once a week, so that it doesn’t become too strong. The lark is purged with dry mortar, composed of lime and sand, to keep it from becoming too strong and fat. Small young birds are purged with the same dry mortar, by placing small lumps of it in their cages. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nest of the bunting, otherwise know as verdaule. This bird is very simple—minded, I have previously let two go, which after a few days returned to their cage. To feed young goldfinches, it is necessary to crush almonds with very fine breadcrumbs, and lettuce seeds or hemp seeds. For linnets, some rapeseed.
Curried steel and files
The steel that blacksmiths & iron workers commonly use is not refined like that from Germany or Biscay, which is reduced in hardness p in a bath of a molten iron, but only among the iron bars which are transported in flat ingots from the forges of Foix & elsewhere, there is a harder & whiter & finer kind than the other, as it comes from the mine. And the workers choose it & use it like the other steel. And because it comes from common iron, they call it strong iron. But it is not as excellent as purified steel like that from Germany & Biscaye, which is sold in small beads. Some curry steel, giving it a heating, then temper it & water in a large quantity of water, then forge it. & fine steel, which is brittle, breaks and crumbles, & iron allows itself to be stretched. Thus they separate the finest steel &, which with another heating they reduce to a mass. The Germans make their files from strong iron.
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One applies steel to tools dess not on both sides, but underneath the part where one sharpens & whets them. & in this part, they must be of very doulx iron.
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Levantines refine our steel because their country does not provide them with any. And they reheat it in a pot with bitumen, &c.