158 INSECTS AS FOOD. 



think whether we are indebted to Insects for any other des- 

 cription of palative luxury. Why no, say those who have 

 only lived and looked at home ; but they who have been at 

 Rome may tell us that snails are there commonly sold and 

 eaten, especially as Lenten food. Well, but snails are not 

 Insects : true, though they were once so considered ; but we 

 have only to go back to the commencement of the Christian era, 

 and we shall find that while John the Baptist was subsisting 

 in the desert of Judea, upon the simple and ordinary fare of 

 "locusts and wild honey/' imperial luxurious Rome was 

 regaling, in her bancjuet halls, upon veritable Insects luscious 

 Caterpillar grubs, fattened on flour, as we fatten oysters upon 

 meal. This was the Cossus of Pliny, and supposed identical 

 with the unsightly wood-devouring larva of the great Goat 

 Moth, a lurid red and yellowish Caterpillar, bulky, black- 

 headed, and black-clawed, a darkling dweller in the trunk of oak 

 or willow, of which, in due season, we have much more to tell. 

 Again, without going back at all into remote ages, we have 

 only to go east and west, north and south, into countries which 

 now brought near by the power of steam, are remote no longer, 

 and we shall still find men in daily commission of what to the 

 narrow ken of prejudice, may seem the enormity of Insect-eating; 

 thereto incited, in one quarter, by the caprice of Epicurean 

 luxury, in another by the united pressure of indolence and 

 scarcity. The two extremes of society, civilized and barbarous, 

 are here brought together in one common habit. See, in the 



