THE TREPANG. 



5 l S 



THE TREPANG. 



By WILLIAM MARSHALL. 



THE variety of food substances that men have obtained from 

 the animal and vegetable kingdoms is really wonderful. One 

 might say, " There are many men on the earth, and every one will 

 eat what he can get the most of and at the cheapest rate, and so 

 they have tried and tasted them all." We may grant this, but 

 the most curious fact in the matter is, that the strangest dishes 

 are not foods of the masses of the people, but are rather the costly 

 dainties of the wealthy classes. Nowhere have such rare tastes 

 in food been developed as among the Romans in ancient times 

 and the Chinese. There may be found in the bills of fare of the 

 latter people addled eggs, fat grubs, caterpillars, sharks' fins, rats, 

 dogs, Indian birds' nests, and — the finest of all their delicacies — 

 trepang. What is trepang ? 



Trepang or tripang is a collective name by which a considera- 

 ble number of species of most curious sea animals are designated ; 

 they are also known as sea rollers, sea cucumbers, in French as 

 cornichons de mer, and scientifically as holothurias. They are 

 among the most sluggish of animals. Only the fixed or stationary 

 animals are slower than the holothurias. They lie like gray, 

 brown, or black leather pipes or cylinders on the bottom of the 

 sea. One might watch them half a day long, if he had nothing 

 better to do, and hardly see them change their position ; and they 

 rarely move more than a foot or 

 two in several hours. Their class 

 relatives, the other spiny-skinned 

 animals or echinoderms, are much 

 more active. A sea urchin or a star- 

 fish is able to get away from a spot 

 quite nimbly, and the serpent-stars, 

 the most active members of the 

 whole order, are capable of using 

 their long, slender, many-jointed 

 arms as legs, and are as quick and 

 alert as crabs. 



One would not suppose, at the 

 first glance, that the sea cucumbers 

 are relatives of the sea urchins and 



starfishes ; for while the skin of the latter is thickly armed with 

 scales of limestone, and they possess a radial structure that is 

 easily distinguished, the appearance of the others is very differ- 

 ent. The skin of most of them, including the trepang, is always 

 leathery, compact, and closely adherent to the muscular system. 



Fig. 1.— Serpent, or Brittle Starfish. 



