If you wish for the authority of the learned: Lalande, the celebrated French astronomer, was equally fond of these delicacies, according to Latreille. And if, not content with eating spiders seriatim, you should feel desirous of eating them by handfuls, you may shelter yourself under the authority of the German immortalized by Rosel, who used to spread them upon bread like butter, observing that he found them very useful.[34]
These edible spiders, and such like, are all sufficiently disgusting, but we feel our nausea quite turned into horror when we read in Humboldt, that he has seen the Indian children drag out of the earth centipedes 18 inches long, and more than half an inch broad, and devour them.
CRUSTACEA.
The flesh of all crustaceous animals, although in great request, is rather difficult of digestion; and much of it cannot be eaten with impunity. There are classes of persons who are as averse to use shell-fish for food, as a Mahommedan or Mussulman are to partake of pork. It is therefore curious to reflect how, and where, the thousands of tons of crustacea and shell-fish taken to Billingsgate and Hungerford markets are disposed of. Lobsters, cray-fish, prawns, shrimps, oysters, mussels, periwinkles, and whelks, are there every morning in great abundance, and the high retail prices they fetch, show that this description of food must be well relished by the Londoners.
The land crabs of the West Indies are an esteemed delicacy, and the ravenous pigs feed on them with equal avidity to the great danger of their health.
I need not here advert to the migratory habits of the crabs, to their uniting at certain periods in vast numbers, and moving in the most direct course to the sea, marching in squadrons and lines, and halting twice a-day for feeding and repose. These movements may often be seen in Jamaica, and other West Indian islands, where millions on millions string themselves along the coast on progresses from the hills to the sea, and from the sea to the hills.
The reader of Bishop Heber’s Indian Journal will remember his account of the land crabs at Poonah. ‘All the grass land generally through the Deckan swarms with a small land crab, which burrows in the ground, and runs with considerable swiftness, even when encumbered with a bundle of food almost as big as itself. This food is grass or the green stalks of rice; and it is amusing to see them sitting as it were upright, to cut their hay with their sharp pincers, then waddling off with the sheaf to their holes as quietly as their side-long pace will carry them.’
This is not the same land crab of which we are speaking, but it is a graphic picture of the Gecarcina ruricola, in its habit of feeding.
They cut up roots and leaves, and feed on the fallen fruit of trees; but we have little more than conjecture for the cause of their occasional deleterious qualities. Impressed with the notion that the crabs owe their hurtful qualities to the fruit of the manchineel tree, Sloane imagined that he had explained the fatal accidents which have occurred to some persons after eating them, from neglect, or inattentiveness to precaution in cleaning their interior and removing the half digested particles of the fruit. It has been ascertained that they feed on such dangerous vegetables of the morass as the Anona palustris, a fruit exceedingly narcotic. It is well enough known that the morass crab is always to be suspected. The land crabs, however, collect leaves less for food than to envelop themselves in, when they moult. After concealment for a time within their burrows, they come forth in those thin teguments forming a red tense pellicle, similar to wet parchment, and are more delicate in that condition, and more prized for the table. The white crabs are the most bulky of the tribe, and are the least esteemed, and the most mistrusted.
Land-crabs, says a Jamaica paper, of March last, are to be seen on the highways between this, Montego Bay, and Gum Island, just like bands of soldiers, marching to a battle-point of concentration. This bids fair to supply the epicure, at an easy rate, with this class of crustacea. It is one of the most remarkable, for it is composed of animals breathing by means of branchiæ or gills, and yet essentially terrestrial; so much so, indeed, that they would perish from asphyxia if submerged for any length of time.