43 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the green turtle are held in great esteem 

 wherever they are found. The mother-tur- 

 tles lay three times a year, depositing some- 

 times as many as a hundred eggs at a lay- 

 ing, and carefully covering them up with 

 sand, so that it requires an experienced 

 searcher to detect them. The Indians of 

 the Orinoco and Amazon obtain from these 

 eggs a kind of clear, sweet oil, which they 

 use instead of butter. About five thousand 

 eggs are required to fill one of their jars 

 with oil ; yet so abundantly are they depos- 

 ited that about five thousand jars are put 

 up yearly at the mouth of one of the riv- 

 ers; the harvest is estimated by the acre. 

 Young eggs are frequently found in the 

 bodies of slain turtles by hundreds, in all 

 stages of development, and generally con- 

 sisting entirely of yolk ; they are often pre- 

 served by drying, and are considered a great 

 luxury. Alligators' eggs are esteemed by 

 the natives of the regions where those rep- 

 tiles abound ; and Mr. Joseph, in his " His- 

 tory of Trinidad," says that he found the 

 eggs of the cayman very good. The female 

 alligator lays from one hundred and twenty 

 to one hundred and sixty eggs ; they are 

 about as large as the egg of a turkey and 

 have a rough, shell filled with a thick albu- 

 men. One of the lizards, known as the 

 iguana, is capable of furnishing as many as 

 fourscore eggs, which when boiled are like 

 marrow. The larvae and nymphae of ants 

 are considered by many people a choice rel- 

 ish when spread upon bread and butter, and 

 are said to be excellent curried. In Siam 

 they are highly esteemed, and are so valu- 

 able as to be within the reach only of the 

 rich. In some parts of Africa, where ants 

 swarm, they are said to form at times a con- 

 siderable proportion of the food-supply. 

 They are used in some countries of Europe 

 for making formic acid, and are subject to 

 an import duty. The eggs of insects be- 

 longing to a group of aquatic beetles are 

 made in Mexico into a kind of bread or 

 cake called, liautlc, which is eaten by the 

 people, and may be found in the markets. 

 They are got by means of bundles of reeds 

 or rushes, which are put in the water and 

 on which they are deposited by the insects. 

 Brantz Mayer, about forty years ago, noticed 

 men on the Lake of Tczcuco collecting the 

 eggs of flies which, he says, when cooked in 



cakes were not different from fish-spawn 

 having the same appearance and flavor. 

 " After the frogs of France and the birds' 

 nests of China, I fancy they would be con- 

 sidered delicacies, and I found they were 

 not disdained on the fashionable' tables of 

 the capital." According to the report of 

 the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1870, 

 the larvse of a large fly which frequents 

 Mono Lake, in California, are dried and 

 pulverized and mixed with acorn-meal and 

 baked for bread, or with water and boiled 

 for soup. 



Sanitary Inspection of Honses, Mr. 



Lewis Angell, Sanitary Inspector of West 

 Ham in Essex, an outlying district of Lon^ 

 don, says, in illustration of the prevalence 

 of sanitary defects even in the best houses, 

 and of the need of thorough inspection, 

 that in the civic palace of the Lord Ma} r or 

 of London, " three quarters of an inch of 

 floating fungi scurf was recently found on 

 the surface, and three eighths of an inch of 

 mud at the bottom of the cisterns, while a 

 bottle of water on his lordship's table con- 

 tained hundreds of nematoid worms." Of- 

 fensive mud and animal organisms were 

 also found in the cistern of the Athenaeum 

 Club, St. James. We habitually defy dis- 

 ease when we leave the dcors of our closets 

 open and the windows shut. The reverse 

 ought to be the practice. He believes that 

 sanitary science should be put on a par 

 with literary and mathematical studies in 

 the schools, and that public and official in- 

 spection should be provided for everywhere, 

 the expense in the care of new buildings to 

 be met by fees charged upon the owners 

 and builders, who expect to derive a profit 

 from them. He commends what has been 

 done in Chicago in the official inspection of 

 tenements, and the official supervision of 

 plumbing that has recently been adopted 

 in New York. 



The Screw-Propeller. The people of 

 Boulogne, France, have recently set up a 

 statue of Frederic Sauvage, to whom they 

 ascribe the invention of the screw-propeller. 

 He devised a means of propulsion by screws 

 in 1832, and offered it to the French Gov- 

 ernment. A commission reported upon it 

 that it might be employed with advantage 



