In Portugal and Spain, bucaro clays are made into vessels, from which many are fond of drinking on account of the smell of the clay; and the women of the province of Alentejo acquire a habit of masticating the bucaro earth, and feel it a great privation when unable to indulge in this vitiated taste.
In the Bolivian markets, Dr. Weddell saw a grey-coloured clay which was offered for sale. It is called pahsa, and the Indians of La Paz eat it with the bitter potato of the country. It is steeped in water, made into a kind of gruel, and seasoned with salt.
At Chiquisaca a kind of earth called chaco is made into little pots, and eaten like chocolate. Although their moderate use is not calculated to injure the system, their contribution to the nourishment of the body must be but small.
In the valleys of the Sikkim Himalayas, a kind of red earth is chewed as a cure for the goître, but it is not stated to be regularly indulged in as an article of food either there or in any other part of India.
Mr. Wallace relates that a little Indian boy died from the habit of dirt-eating—a very common and destructive habit among Indians and half breeds in the houses of the whites in the Amazon valley. All means had been tried to cure the lad of the habit. He had been physicked and whipped, and confined in doors; but when no other opportunity offered, he would find a plentiful supply in the mud walls of the house. The whole body, face, and limbs swelled, so that he could with difficulty walk, and not having so much care taken of him, he ate his fill and died.
Those who have had much to do with children, will have noticed amongst some of them the germs of this propensity, which will occasionally develop itself in chewing pieces of pipe, slate pencil, chalk, and other substances of a like nature. Although not carried to so great an extent as to become injurious, cases of this kind are far from being, among school children, either exceptional or uncommon.
In the mission of San Borja, Humboldt found the child of an Indian woman, which, according to the statement of its mother, would hardly eat anything but earth. It was very thin and emaciated.
These instances are not, after all, so singular as those of habitual, national dirt-eating which we find amongst the tribes of South America and the negroes of Africa. Children are not always the most particular in the choice of their articles of food, or we should not read of such instances as occur in tropical America of these youngsters drawing immense centipedes out of their holes and eating them; or, as related by Captain Cochrane, of a child devouring several pieces of tallow candle, which was succeeded by a large lump of yellow soap, all of which he seemed to enjoy.
Chroniclers often make mention of the employment, during times of war, of kinds of infusorial earth as food, under the general term of mountain meal. This was the case in the Thirty Years War, at Camin in Pomerania, Muskau in the Lausitz, and Kleiken in the Dessau territory; and subsequently in 1719 and 1733 at the fortress of Wittenberg. But in times of war and scarcity, one is prepared to hear of men satisfying their hunger by every legitimate means.
M. S. Julien sent to the Academy of Sciences at Paris some few years since, specimens of a peculiar mineral substance from the province of Kiang-si in China, on which, in times of famine, the inhabitants have been said to be able to support themselves as a nutriment. It has a disagreeable taste, and produces dryness in the mouth. It is nevertheless used by the natives mixed with flour, and is even esteemed by them.