General Considerations. 



221 



the Sabbath, so that the people get a hot meal without the 

 sin of lighting a fire on that day. In the Abb6 Godard's 

 '•'-Description et Histoire de Maroc" (Paris, 1860), he tells 

 us that 4< they are placed in bags, salted, and either baked 

 or boiled. They are then dried on the terraced roofs of 

 the houses. Fried in oil they are not bad." Some of our 

 Indians collect locusts by lighting fires in the direct path 

 of the devouring swarms. In roasting, the wings and legs 

 crisp up and are separated ; the bodies are then eaten fresh 

 or dried in hot ashes and put away for future use. Our 

 Digger Indians roast them, and grind or pound them to a 

 kind of flour, which they mix with pounded acorns, or 

 with different kinds of berries, make into cakes and dry in 

 the sun for future use. 



The species employed by the ancients were doubtless the 

 same as those employed at the present day in the East, 

 viz., the two already mentioned, and, to a less degree, the 

 smaller Caloptenus Italiciis. We have no records of any 

 extended use of our own Rocky Mountain species (Calop- 

 tenus spretus), unless — which is not improbable — the 

 species employed by the Indians on the Pacific coast 

 should prove to be the same, or a geographical race of the 

 same. 



It had long been a desire with me to test the value of 

 this species (spretus) as food, and I did not lose the oppor- 

 tunity to gratify that desire, which the recent locust inva- 

 sions into some of the Mississippi Yalley States offered. I 

 knew well enough that the attempt would provoke to ridi- 

 cule and mirth, or even disgust, the vast majority of our 

 people, unaccustomed to anything of the sort, and associ- 

 ating with the word insect or "bug" everything horrid 

 and repulsive. Yet I was governed by weightier reasons 

 than mere curiosity ; for many a family in Kansas and 

 Nebraska was in 1874 brought to the brink of the grave by 



