EDIBLE GASTEROPODS. 41 



subsisting. In the Isle of Skye, for example, we are told 

 that there is almost annually a degree of famine, when the 

 poor are left to Providence's care, and prowl, like other 

 animals, along the shores, to pick up limpets and other shell- 

 fish, " the casual repast," adds Mr. Pennant, from whom 

 I have borrowed this melancholy account, " of hundreds, 

 during part of the year, in these unhappy islands."* 



Fig. 6. 



The case is now, I trust, much altered for the better ; but 

 still it is occasionally bad enough. Dr. Maccullock, in his 

 account of the Highlands and Western Islands published in 

 1824, says "Where the river meets the sea at Tongue 

 there is a considerable ebb, and the long sand-banks are 

 productive of cockles in an abundance which is almost un- 

 exampled. At that time (a year of scarcity), they presented 

 every day at low water a singular spectacle, being crowded 

 with men, women, and children, who were busily employed 

 in digging for these shell-fish as long as the tide permitted. 

 It was not unusual also to see thirty or forty horses from the 

 surrounding country, which had been brought down for the 

 purpose of carrying away loads of them to distances of many 

 miles. This was a well-known season of scarcity, and, with- 

 out this resource, I believe it is not too much to say that 

 many individuals must have died of want."f 



* Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772. See also a pain- 

 ful and truly affecting statement by Mr. Patterson " On the Common Limpet 

 considered as an Article of Food in the North of Ireland," in Ann. Nat. Hist. 

 iii. 231. Mr. Patterson has abridged this paper in his Zoology for Schools, 

 171-2. " The inhabitants of the rest of the Orcades despise those of Swona 

 for eating limpets, as being the last of human meannesses.'* Life of Sir 

 W. Scott, iii. 191. 



+ Vol. iii. 349. The island of Barra has been long famous for its cockles. 

 " This ile," says Dean Monro, " is full of grate cokills, and alledgit by the 

 ancient countrymen that the same cokills comes down out of the foresaid 

 hill through the said strype, in the first small forme that we have spoken of, 

 and after ther coming down to the sandes growis grate cokills always. Ther 



