66 INSECTS AS FOOD. 



description of palative luxury. Why no, say those who have 

 only lived and looked at home; but they who have been at 

 Rome may tell us that snails are there commonly sold and 

 eaten, especially as Lenten food. Well, but snails are not 

 Insects : true, though they were once so considered ; but we 

 have only to go back to the commencement of the Christian era, 

 and we shall find that while John the Baptist was subsisting 

 in the desert of Judea, upon the simple and ordinary fare of 

 " locusts and wild honey," imperial luxurious Rome was 

 regaling, in her banquet halls, upon veritable Insects luscious 

 Caterpillar grubs, fattened on flour, as we fatten oysters upon 

 meal. This was the Cossus of Pliny, and supposed identical 

 with the unsightly wood-devouring larva of the great Goat 

 Moth, a lurid red and yellowish Caterpillar, bulky, black- 

 headed, and black-clawed, a darkling dweller in the trunk of 

 oak or willow. 



Again, without going back at all into remote ages, we have 

 only to go east and west, north and south, into countries which 

 now brought near by the power of steam, are remote no longer, 

 and we shall still find men in daily commission of what, to the 

 narrow ken of prejudice, may seem the enormity of Insect- 

 eating ; thereto incited, in one quarter, by the caprice of Epi- 

 curean luxury, in another, by the united pressure of indolence 

 and scarcity. The two extremes of society, civilized and bar- 

 barous, are here brought together in one common habit. See, 

 in the West Indies, the French planter gourmand (and some- 

 times the English, as his copyist), seated at his luxurious table, 

 oiling the hinges of his worn-out appetite with those lumps of 

 insect fatness known as the grubs of the Palm Weevil ; and 

 then turn to the poor degraded Hottentot, squatted on the arid 

 ground, swallowing, by handfuls, White Ants roasted, or just 

 as often, too hungry or too indolent to dress them, devouring 

 the uncooked Insects. 1 



But, after all, none can pronounce these Acridophagi or 

 1 Smeathmaa. 



