GUIMARÃES, a fortified city of Portugal, province of Minho, government district of Braga, is beautifully situated on the Ave, 12 miles south-east of Braga. It stands on an acclivity,and with its Moorish towers has a very picturesque appearance. An old castle which was the birthplace of Alphonso, the first king of Portugal, is still in a state of good preservation. Among the four churches may be mentioned the Colegiata, founded in 1385, and although modernized still retaining intact its beautiful choir. The principal manufactures are knives and other steel wares, leather, paper, and table linen. In the neighbourhood there are sulphurous springs, with a temperature of 164° Fahr., frequented since the origin of the city in the 4th century. Guimardes was made the chief town of the countship of Portugal in the 11th century by Henry of Burgundy, and retained that honour till 1511, when it was conferred by King Emanuel on Lisbon. The population is about 10,000.
GUINEA, the general name applied by Europeans to part of the western coast region of intertropical Africa. Like many other geographical designations the use of which is controlled neither by natural nor political boundaries, it has been very differently employed by different writers and at different periods. Inthe widest acceptation of the term, the Guinea coast may be said to extend from 11° N. lat. to 16° S. lat., or in other words, from the neighbourhood of Cape Verga to Cape Negro. Southern or Lower Guinea comprises the coasts of Loango, Congo, Angola, and Ben- guela; an] Northern or Upper Guinea comprises part of Senegambia, the Sierra Leone district, the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, the Niger Delta, and the Calabar district. The Cameroon mountains may be accepted as the limit of the two divisions, though some writers prefer the river Gambia or the equator. In a narrower and perhaps more common use of the name, Guinza is the coast only from Cape Palmas to the Gaboon. Originally, on the other hand, Guinea was supposed to commence as far north as Cape Nun opposite the Canary Islan ls ; and Azurara is said to be the first authority who brings the boundary south to the Senegal. The name is derived from Ginnie, Genna, or Jinnis, a town and kingdom in the Niger district ; and, though it appears on a map as early as 1351, it did not come into general use till the close of the 15th century. Few questions in historical geography have been more keenly discussed than that of tie first discovery of Guinea by the navigators of modern Europe. It appears from the testimony of Jacopo Doria that two Genoese, Ugolino and Guido de Vivaldi, were sailing south along the African coast in 1291, but there is almost no further record of their voyage. The French claim that in the latter part of the 14th century the people of Dieppe sent out several expeditions to Guinea; and Jean de Bethencourt, who settled in the Canaries about 1402, made explorations towards the south. At length, in the latter half of the 15th century, the consecutive efforts of the navigators employed by Prince Henry of Portugal, Cadamosto, Usodimare, and Diogo Gomes, made the whole region familiar to Europeans.
See Azurara, Chronica de descobrimento ¢ conguista de Guiné, pub- lished, with an introduction, by Barros de Santarem, Paris, 1841; Villault de Bellefond, Relation des Costes @ Afrique appellées Guinée, Paris, 1679; Desmarquets, Além. chron. pour servir a Phist. de Dieppe, 1875; Major, Life of Prince Henry the Navigator, London, 1868 ; and the elaborate review of Major's work by M. Jodine in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géogr., 1873.
GUINEA FOWL, a well-known domestic gallinaceous bird, so called from the country whence in modern times it was brought to Europe, the Afeleagris and Avis or Gallina Numidica of ancient authors.[1] Little is positively known of the wild stock to which we owe our tame birds, nor can the period of its reintroduction (for there is apparently no evidence of its domestication being continuous from the time of the Romans) be assigned more than rouglhiy to that of the African discoveries of the Portuguese. It does not seem to have been commonly known till the middle of the 16th century, when Caius sent a description and figure, with the name of Gallus Mauritanus, to Gesner, who published both in his Puralipomena in 1555, and in the same year Belon also gave a notice and woodcut under the name of Poulle de la Guinée; but while the former authors properly referred their bird to the ancient JJ/eleayris, the latter confounded the Jeleagris and the Turkey.
The ordinary Guinea Fowl of our poultry-yards is the Numida meleagris of ornithologists, and is too common a bird to need description. The chief or only changes which domestication seems to have induced in its appearance are a tendency to albinisin generally shown in the plumage of its lower parts, and frequently, though not always, the con- version of the colour of its legs and fect from dark greyish- brown to bright orange. That the home of this species is West Africa from the Gambia[2] to the Gaboon is certain, but its range in the interior is quite unknown. It appears to have been imported early into the Cape Verd Islands, where, as also in some of the Greater Antilles and in Ascen- sion, it has run wild. Representing the species in South Africa we have the WY. coronata, which is very numerous from the Cape Colony to Ovampoland, and the .V. cornuta of Drs Finsch and Hartlaub, which replaces it in the west as far as the Zambesi. Madagascar also has its peculiar species, distinguishable by its red crown, the iV. metrata of Pallas, a name which has often been misapplied to the last. This bird has been introduced to Rodriguez, where it is now found wild. Abyssinia is inhabited by another species, the WV. ptilorhyncha,[3] which differs fromm all the foregoing by the absence of any red colouring about the head. Very different from all of them, and the finest species known, is the .V. vulturina of Zanzibar, conspicuous by the bright blue in its plumage, the hackles that adorn the lower part of its neck, and its long tail. By some writers it is thought to form a separate genus, uferyllcum. All these Guinea Fowls are characterized by having the crown bare of feathers and elevated into a bony “helmet,” but there is another group (to which the name Guttera las been given) in which a thick tuft of feathers ornaments the top of the head. This contains four or five species, all inhabiting some part or other of Africa, the best known being the N. cristata from Sierra Leone and other places on the western coast. This bird, apparently mentioned by Marc- grave more than 200 years ago, but first described by Pallas, is remarkable for the structure— unique, if net possessed by its representative forms—of its furcu/a, where the head, instead of being the thin plate found in all other Gudline, is a hollow cup opening upwards, into which the trachea dips, and then emerges on its way to the lungs. Allied to the genus Numida, but readily distinguished therefrom among other characters by the possession of spurs, are two- very rare forms, Agelastes and Phasidus, both from Western Africa. Of their habits nothing is known. All these Lirds are beautifully figured in Mr Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasianide, from drawings by Mr Wolf.
(a. n.)
- ↑ Columella (De Re Rustica, viii., cap. 2) distinguishes the J/elea- gris from the Gallina Africana or Numidica, the laiter having, he says, a red wattle (palea, a reading obviously preferable to galea), while it was blue in the former. This would look as if the Meleagris had sprung from what is now called Numida plilorhyucha, while the Gallina Africana originated in the .V. meleagris,—species which, as will be seen by the text, have a different range, and if so the fact would point to two distinet introductions—one by Grecks, the other by Latins.
- ↑ Specimens from the Gambia are said to be smaller, and have been described as distinct under the name of .V. rendalli.
- ↑ Mr Darwin (Anim. and Pl. under Domestication, i. p. 294), gives this as the original stock of our modern domestic birds, but herein the writer ventures to think he has been misled. As before observed, it may possibly have been the true peAeaypis of the Greeks.
