436 PROSE HALIETJTICS. 



lars, may have resemMed them in this also, and in the 

 midst of their orgies and atrocities have enjoyed a calm 

 circulation. 



Sharks are sometimes eaten, but more out of bravado 

 and revenge than because they aflford a desirable food. 

 Athenseus indeed records that the Greeks were squalo- 

 phagi, but then they would eat anything. Archestratus, 

 the bon-vivant of his book, will not allow men to ob- 

 ject to sharks, merely because the shark sometimes eats 

 men ; and if this were all, we might readily agree with 

 him, but Galen speaks disparagingly of sharks' flesh, 

 from its tendency to produce melancholy ! We do not 

 know whether the Latins liked them. Among modem 

 nations, the Chinese make a shark-chonda, which has a 

 great name ; the Italians and Sicilians cook not only the 

 belly of the old fish but foetal sharks (which are not 

 much bigger than gudgeons) whenever they can procure 

 a dish. In the still less dainty Hebrides, the ' squalus 

 vulgaris' is consumed entire; and though in England 

 they are not relished, in Norway and Iceland the in- 

 habitants make indiscriminate use of every species cap- 

 tured, hanging up the carcases for a whole year like 

 hams, that the flesh may become mellow. Though no 

 part of the shark is really wholesome, one part, the liver 

 (which is very valuable in a commercial point of view, 

 from the abundance of oil squeezed from it), is highly 

 prejudicial for food, as we learn, on the evidence of the 

 foUowmg case of an obscure French cobbler, recorded by 

 an eminent French physician (Sauvages) . 



Sieur Gervais, his wife and two children, supped upon 

 a piece of shark's liver ; in less than half an hour all were 

 seized with invincible drowsiness, and threw themselves 

 on a straw mattress; nor did they arouse to conscious- 

 ness till the third day. At the end of this long lethargy 

 their faces were inflamed and red, with an insupportable 

 itching of the whole body ; complete desquamation of the 



