INSECTS IN RELATION TO MAN. 561 



wise I should have endeavoured to rear them. There is no Scolechiasis, 

 as Kirby and Spence call it, in opposition to Phthriasis, but the in- 

 stances in which sick people have evacuated the larvae of insects have 

 been accidentally occasioned. 



The advantages which, on the other side, man derives from insects 

 are also not insignificant. We cannot indeed maintain of any indi- 

 vidual insect that it forms a very important and necessary food to man, 

 but there are instances of insects being used as food, and indeed as 

 delicate dishes. The Cossus of the Greeks and the Romans, which at 

 the time of the greatest luxury among the latter was introduced at 

 the tables of the rich, was the larva of a large beetle that lives in the 

 stems of trees ; and was, according to Keferstein *, the larva of a 

 large species of Calandra, a native of Persia and Mesopotamia. In the 

 Brazils, also, the larva of the large Calandra palmarum is eaten, and 

 even considered by many as a choice morsel. The grasshoppers are 

 said to furnish good food to the Bedouins of Egypt. The ancients were 

 likewise acquainted with this food of the Africans, and they distinguished 

 a particular tribe by the name of Acridophagi. Even among the 

 natives of Senegambia and the negroes of the coast of Guinea we find 

 locusts used as food. The Cicada, which are in many respects closely 

 allied to the locusts, were eaten by the ancients, especially the fat gravid 

 females ; the males were less so, as they, from their large air-bladders, 

 were considered as empty. Amongst the Hymenoptera there are two 

 families, whose economy has been already described, which yield food, 

 namely, the ants, which, from their agreeable sour flavour, are eaten by 

 several Brazilian tribes ; and the bees, whose collected provision con- 

 sists of honey, of which mention is made as food even in the earliest 

 records, and which is everywhere used as such at the present day. 

 Manna also, which is the juice of an Arabian plant, the Tamarix 

 mannifera, dried in the sun, is caused to flow by the puncture of a 

 small species of Coccus, and is an agreeably flavoured substance, fre- 

 quently used in the East as food. If the pleasant taste of these sub- 

 stances readily explains their adoption as articles of food, it is, therefore, 

 the more incomprehensible how certain tribes, for instance, the Adyr- 

 machidce, according to Herodotus, the Hottentots and the South 

 American Charruels, can devour as delicacies their own vermin, a fact 

 related and confirmed by many travellers. 



* Uber den uniuittelbarcn Nutzen der Insekteu. Krfurt, 1829. 4to. P. 8 10. 



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