416 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
chosen to believe they were of vegetable nature, as cassia 
pods. But this is not so. Almost every traveller of note has 
told how the Locust insects are enjoyed as food in the East. 
Pliny records this fact, and Herodotus describes the mode 
adopted of powdering Locusts for baking them into cakes. 
Sometimes they are merely fried, their legs and wings plucked 
off, and the bodies eaten, flavoured with pepper and salt ; 
other persons powder and bake them ; or again, they are boiled, 
turning red aiter the fashion of lobsters, during the process. 
In India, like every other article of food, they are curried. 
At Tonquin these insects are sold in the market as a great 
delicacy. Mattieu Williams advises that the introduction of 
Locusts fried, and tinned, as an epicurean delicacy, would be a 
boon to suffering humanity, by supplying industrial employment 
to the inhabitants of districts subject to periodical invasions by 
swarms of locusts, amounting to a plague by their devastations. 
The notion of eating them appears repulsive at first, but chitin 
is chitin, whether elaborated on land, or secreted in the sea. 
The vegetarian Locust, and the cicada (grasshopper) are free 
from the pungent essential oils of the really unpleasant cockchater. 
Though, concerning this latter insect, Melolontha vulgaris, (the 
fat chafer) as food, Vincent Holt quotes the jaunty rooks as 
excellent judges. Lalande, the French astronomer, found that 
caterpillars tasted of almonds, and that spiders had a nutty 
flavour. By the Congress of Entomologists held at Paris, in 
1887, it was solemnly proclaimed that cockchafers, at least 
when young, are a “ perfect food,’ if their preparation be 
rightly understood. The recipe which was then drawn up for 
“Cockchafer Soup” ran as follows :—‘‘ Take a_ sufficient 
number of cockchafers, pound them in a mortar, then strain 
them through a sieve. For a light clear soup use water; for 
a thick ditto add fat. In both cases the result is delicious, 
and calculated to please the most fastidious of gourmets.” 
Anyhow, be their culinary and curative uses what they may, 
we all owe much of our outward welfare to the insect world; 
and it were well for us if we might minister to the happiness of 
our neighbours at large as abundantly as insects subserve our 
enjoyment of nature around us. The insect is the prince of 
gardeners. His buttercup, his dandelion, and his meadowsweet 
grow thick in every English field ; his thyme clothes the hillside ; 
his heather purples the bleak, grey moorland; high up among 
