Here is the recipe for 'escargots à la bourguignonne,' which despite the prejudice engendered by Leviticus (XI, 30.) may be recommended to the American palate jaded by beefsteak and potatoes and the high cost of living: "Mettre les escargots a bouillir pendant 5 a 10 minutes dans de l'eau salée, les retirer de leur coquille, les laver a l'eau froide pour les debarrasser du limon, les cuire dans un court-bouillon fortement assaisonné. Apres cuisson les replacer dans le coquille bien nettoyee, en les garnissant au fond et par dessus d'une farce de beurre frais manipule avec un fin hachis de persil, cerfeuil, ail, echalote, sel et poivre. Avant de servir, faire chauffer au four.">[
[Footnote 196: Reading LXXX quadrantes. A comparison may be made of this capacity with that of the ordinary snail known to the Romans, for their smallest unit of liquid measure was called a cochlear, or snail shell, and contained.02 of a modern pint, or, as we may say, a spoonful: indeed the French word cuiller is derived from cochlear.]
[Footnote 197: It is perhaps well to remind the American reader that the European dormouse (Myoxus glis. Fr. loir. Ger. siebenschlafer) is rather a squirrel than a mouse, and that he is still esteemed a dainty edible, as he was by the Romans: indeed when fat, just before he retires to hibernate, he might be preferred to 'possum and other strange dishes on which some hospitable Americans regale themselves and the patient palates of touring Presidents. In his treatise De re culinaria Apicius gives a recipe for a ragout of dormice which sounds appetizing.]
[Footnote 198: Darwin (Animals and Plants, XVIII) says: "I have never heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity.">[
[Footnote 199: Varro makes no mention of tea and bread and butter as part of the diet of a dormouse; so we are better able to understand his abstinence at the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland. As Martial (III, 58) calls him somniculosus, it is probable that his table manners on that occasion were nothing new and that his English and German names were always justified.]
[Footnote 200: This is one of Varro's puns which requires a surgical operation to get it into one's head. Appius is selected to talk about bees because his name has some echo of the sound of apis, the word for bee.]
[Footnote 201: The study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as it is to us. There have survived from among many others the treatises of Aristotle, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny, but they are all made up, as Maeterlinck has remarked, of "erreurs charmantes," and for that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage in the mellifluous verses of the fourth Georgic, which follow Varro closely.]
[Footnote 202: He might have said also that the hexagonal form of construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result with the least labour and material. Maeterlinck rehearses (La Vie des Abeilles, 138) the result of the study of this problem in the highest mathematics:
"Réaumur avait proposé au célèbre mathematicien Koenig le problem suivant: 'Entre toutes les cellules hexagonales a fond pyramidal compose de trois rhombes semblables et égaux, determiner celle qui peut être construite avec le moins de matière?' Koenig trouva qu'une telle cellule avait son fond fait de trois rhombes dont chaque grand angle était de 109 degrés, 26 minutes et chaque petit de 70 degrés, 34 minutes. Or, un autre savant, Maraldi, ayant mesuré aussi exactement que possible les angles des rhombes construits par les abeilles fixa les grands à 109 degrés, 28 minutes, et les petits a 70 degrés, 32 minutes. Il n'y avait done, entre les deux solutions qu'une difference de 2 minutes. II est probable que l'erreur, s'il y en a une, doit être imputee a Maraldi plutot qu'aux abeilles, car aucun instrument ne permet de mesurer avec une precision infaìllible les angles des cellules qui ne sont pas assez nettlement definis."
Maclaurin, a Scotch physicist, checked Koenig's computations and reported to the Royal Society in London in 1743 that he found a solution in exact accord with Maraldi's measurements, thereby completely justifying the mathematics of the bee architect.]