356 ANIMAL FOOD RESOURCES OF DIFFERENT NATIONS. 



and roughly winnowed, was crushed in a stone mortar 

 and made into cakes, which furnished an important 

 article of food. 



This insect, which has been described as a white grub, 

 is also found abundantly in the waters of Great Salt 

 Lake, Utah, and those of other saline and alkaline lakes 

 of the West, and appears to be the larva of a two-winged 

 fly which is described by the late Prof. Torrey under the 

 name of Ephydra Cali/ornica, and by A. S. Packard as 

 Ephydra gracilis.* 



Some of these larva are eaten raw by the Indians 

 of Western Nevada, and are of a rank and oleaginous 

 taste ; others are made into soup. 



Of the various insects, locusts are those most generally 

 consumed. The law of Moses, as declared in Leviticus, 

 chap, xi., verses 21 and 22, states : — " Yet these may ye 

 eat, of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all 

 four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal 

 upon the earth ; Even these of them ye may eat ; the 

 locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, 

 and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after , 

 his kind." The locust has six feet, but Moses did not 

 regard as legs proper the long hinder ones which enable 

 it to spring or leap. The beetle was the Bruchus, 

 or grasshopper without wings (St. Jerome, Ixx.), the 

 Attachus, a variety of the last-named, and the Ophio- 

 machus, a sort of grasshopper, so called because it was 

 said to fight the serpent (Pliny, book ii., ch. 29). 



The authorities describing locusts as food in various 

 countries are very numerous. Pliny (book xli., chaps. 

 32 and 35) says the Eastern nations and the Parthians 

 considered locusts and grasshoppers as a choice food. 

 The gourmands preferred the males, and the females 

 after casting their eggs ; while the Greeks preferred them 

 with the eggs. St. Jerome says that to feed on these 

 insects was to those nations as great a luxury as to the 



* See Hayden's "Geol. Survey of Montana, Idaho, etc., 1872," 

 p. 744. 



