of the Fishery Board for Scotland. 
217 
' lighter concoction, and better nourishment, yet not laudable meat for 
' such as lead studious or easj- kind of life or have weak stomachs.' * 
Whether we agree or not with this ancient physiological statement, it is 
interesting to notice that the value of cockles as food has been appreciated 
for centuries in our own country. Cockles and mussels are a cheap food, 
and are within the means of the poorer classes of the community. What 
the oyster is to the upper classes and middle classes, they are to the lower 
classes. 1 The poorer classes, who eat cockles in Lancashire and mussels 
' in the Midland Counties, buy whelks and periwinkles in the London 
' markets, f 
While the epicure prefers to eat his shell-fish uncooked, in many places 
cockles are boiled ; and Jeffrey % seems to think that iEsop refers, in his 
fable when the son of the husbandman was apostrophising, ' O most wicked 
' creatures, are you singing, while your houses are being burnt,' to the roast- 
ing of cockles. Fleming, in his History of British Animals, says ' cockles 
' form a very palatable food, either raw or boiled, and are considered in 
' highest season in the spring months.' 
While Forbes and Hanley {British Mollusea, vol. ii.) descant on the 
cockle as most savoury food, few, who can afford to buy the more expen- 
sive oyster, will acquiesce in the judgment of those who prefer cockles 
to oysters, as they mention. These authors say — 'Lieutenant Thomas 
* informs us that in Sanda, among the Orkney Isles, during the late failure 
' of the potato crop, many of the poorer people subsisted almost entirely 
* on cockles.' No doubt, in various districts in the Highlands — in several 
places I have heard such stories from reliable witnesses — during seasons 
of scarcity in bygone times the population had largely to depend for 
sustenance on cockles, mussels, limpets, periwinkles, razor-fish, and edible 
seaweeds. Both Statistical Accounts dwell on the excellence of cockles 
as food, and tell how in times of scarcity the people consumed cockles from 
April to August. Such a diet is still preferable to the contents of the 
tow-net praised as ' food for the shipwrecked,' but they are certainly not 
obtainable by the crew of a raft in mid-ocean, as is the crustacean, 
ccelenterate and other pelagic life of the ocean. Besides being inferior to 
the oyster they are not superior in succulence to the fattened mussel, though 
the latter may not command such a price in the English market as the 
cockle. 
Though generally eaten by themselves either raw or cooked, boiled 
or roasted, they are also used as an addition to sauce for fish, and the 
addition by many is regarded as enhancing the flavour of the sauce. 
They may also be pickled, and by some are eaten in this preserved 
condition ; but, after all, the lover of molluscan food prefers them raw. 
In whichever way they are used, they form a very valuable article of 
food, and the income derived in some districts from their sale is very 
large. Spencer Walpole§ says, 'the cockles which are gathered in 
' Morecambe Bay are sold for at least £20,000 a year.' Whether this 
is the gross proceeds of the sale, without deduction of freight to market, 
or only the amount realised for cockles before transport from More- 
cambe, the sale from Barra beds cannot be expected to yield annually 
anything like even the sum netted by the cockle gatherers of More- 
cambe Bay. Messrs Buckland and Walpole, in their Keport of 1879 
of the Sea Fisheries of England and Wales, say that the value of this 
* Cf. International Fisheries Exhibition Literature, vol. i. W. Stephen Mitchell, 
On the Place of Fish in a Hard- W orking Diet, with Notes on the Use of Fish in Former 
Times. 
t Spencer Walpole, International Fisheries Exhibition Literature, vol. i. p. 62. 
X Loc. cit., vol. ii. p. 290. 
§ Loc. cit., i. p. 47. 
