Il8 CULTIVATION OF THE SNAIL FOR FOOD chap. 



kinds, exanthematous (skin eruptions), choleraic, and paralytic. 

 Cases of similar poisoning are not unfrequent in our own 

 country, and the circumstances tend to show that, besides the 

 danger from mussels bred in stagnant water, there is also risk 

 in eating them when ' out of season ' in the spawning time. 



Whelks are very largely employed for bait, especially in the 

 cod fishery. The whelk fishery in Whitstable Bay, both for bait 

 and for human food, yields .£12,000 a year. Dr. Johnston, of 

 Berwick, estimated that about 12 million limpets were annually 

 consumed for bait in that district alone. The cockle fishery in 

 Carmarthen Bay employs from 500 to 600 families, and is worth 

 X15,000 a year, that in Morecambe Bay is worth £20,000. 



Cultivation of Snails for Food ; Use as Medicine. — It was 

 a certain Fulvius Hirpinus who, according to Pliny the elder,^ 

 first instituted snail preserves at Tarquinium, about 50 B.C. He 

 appears to have bred several species in his ' cochlearia,' keeping 

 them separate from one another. In one division were the 

 alhulae^ which came from Reate ; in another the ' very big snails ' 

 (probably H. lucorum), from Illyria; in a third the African 

 snails, whose characteristic was their fecundity; in a fourth 

 those from Soletum, noted for their ' nobility.' To increase the 

 size of his snails, Hirpinus fed them on a fattening mixture of 

 meal and new wine, and, says the author in a burst of enthusiasm, 

 'the glory of this art was carried to such an extent that a 

 single snail-shell was capable of holding eighty sixpenny pieces.' 

 Varro^ recommends that the snaileries be surrounded by a 

 ditch, to save the expense of a special slave to catch the run- 

 aways. Snails were not regarded by the Romans as a particular 

 luxury. Pliny the younger reproaches^ his friend Septicius 

 Clarus for breaking a dinner engagement with him, at which 

 the menu was to have been a lettuce, three snails and two eggs 

 apiece, barley water, mead and snow, olives, beetroot, gourds 

 and truffles, and going off somewhere else where he got oysters, 

 scallops, and sea-urchins. In Horace's time they were used as 

 a gentle stimulant to the appetite, for 



"'Tis best with roasted shrimps and Afric snails 

 To rouse your drinker when his vigour fails." * 



1 Hist. Nat. ix. 82. 2 j)q ,.g rustica, iii. 14. ^ jEpistles, i. 15. 



* Hor. Sat. II., iv. 58, tr. Conington. 



