4 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



were ever used as human food in this country, though 

 they were so used, and are still said to be, by the 

 poorer peasants in the south of Europe. Cervantes, 

 in his romance of Don Quixote, not only sets them 

 before the goatherds as a dainty, but picks out the 

 choicest as a dessert for the Countess herself. The 

 oaks with edible acorns are not, however, of the same 

 species as the English oak. The Italian oak, which 

 Virgil represents as the monarch of the forest, and 

 of the elevation of whose top, the stedfastness of 

 whose roots, and of whose triumph in its green- 

 ness over the lapse of ages, he gives a splendid 

 description in the second book of his Georgics, bore 

 fruit which was used as food. The Quercus ilex (the 

 evergreen oak), which is still common in Spam, in 

 Italy, in Greece, in Syria, hi the south of France, and 

 on the shores of the Mediterranean, bears a fruit 

 which, in its agreeable flavour, resembles nuts. It is 

 a slow-growing tree, and is always found single, and 

 not in clumps. There is another evergreen oak, 

 Quercus ballota, very common in Spain and Barbary, 

 of which the acorns are most abundant and nutritive. 

 During the late war in Spain, the French armies were 

 fortunate in finding subsistence upon the ballota 

 acorns, in the woods of Salamanca. We are often 

 startled by the assertions of ancient writers, that the 

 acorn, in the early periods of society, formed the prin- 

 cipal food of mankind. Much of our surprise would 

 have ceased had we distinguished between the com- 

 mon acorn, and that of the Ilex, Ballota, and Esculus 

 oaks. Some of the classic authors speak of the fat- 

 ness of the primitive inhabitants of Greece and 

 southern Europe, who, living in the forests which were 

 planted by the hand of nature, were supported almost 

 wholly upon the fruit of the oak. The Grecian poets 

 and historians called these people balanophagi (eat- 

 ers of acorns) ; but then the Greek word balanos, 



