248 ANIMAL FOOD RESOURCES OF DIFFERENT NATIONS. 



as the Secretary of the Treasury at Washington has 

 again rejected their claim. Still the exporters are not 

 convinced, and are now hoping to get their goods ad- 

 mitted as "fish to be used for bait," which is also 

 exempt by virtue of the treaty. So obstinate a con- 

 viction that the creature which " would a wooing go " 

 belongs to the tribe sometimes described as " finny," 

 seems to show that the distinction between beasts, 

 reptiles, and fishes is not quite so clear as naturalists 

 ought by this time to have made it.* 



From a recent article in the St. James's Gazette we 

 quote the following remarks :— " De la Reynifere, in his 

 Annual for 1806, said frogs were only good in spring ; 

 and the late Mr. Dallas, in his ' Book of the Table,' 

 copied this statement in 1877. It may have been true 

 that, as Lenten fare, they were formerly only seen on 

 Parisian tables during those forty days ; but they are 

 decidedly at their best later on, and are essentially a 

 light summer dish. Indeed, the French gourmet we 

 have already quoted goes on to point out how in 

 Auvergne, one Simon of Riom had amassed a couple of 

 hundred thousand francs by serving them in fricassee all 

 the year round, at the price of three a penny. It is 

 absolutely impossible, says this enthusiastic gourmand, 

 to bring on an indigestion of frogs, no matter what 

 quantity you eat ; and this fact is thought, to have 

 turned much to Simon's advantage. He had such an 

 enormous custom that he could not aflfbrd to trust to 

 markets ; and so he filled his cellars with tanks, his 

 tanks with water, and the water with the ' pretty little 

 things ; ' and there fed and fattened them, and fricasseed 

 and sold them, until he distanced all competition. And 

 although he went by the nickname of ' Old Simon the 

 Frog,' and although, too, his surname — as we believe on 

 the word of Hebrew scholars — ^means snub-nosed, neither 

 he nor any of his customers had cause to turn up their 

 noses at frogs, as too many do even at the present day. 



* The Globe. 



