with us. The entrails of the rypeu, mixed
with fresh train-oil and berries, make another
favourite dish; and the Greenlander's winter
preserves are crake-berries, angelica, and
eggs in every stage of incubatory progress,
flung all together into a sack of seal skin,
which is then filled up with train-oil. An
Esquimaux will eat his sledge—when it is
made of dried salmon sewn between two skins;
the cross-pieces being reindeer bones. This
is not so marvellous as it seems to be: it is
not quite like feeding off a one-horse chaise
or clarence with C. springs; but it must be a
curious sight to see a party turn out, and
make a meal of their carriage. Reindeer is
the great delight of the Esquimaux—when
he can get it: and frozen reindeer, eaten raw,
is better, to his taste, than all the royal
venison ever cooked for royal feasts.

Keeping for awhile among the cetacea, we,
find that the manatus, or sea-calf, gives a
white delicate flesh, like young pork; a
lean or fibrous part like very red beef;
and fat which is like hog's lard, with an
exceptional portion lying between the
entrails and the skin, like almond oil in taste,
and an excellent substitute for butter. The
tail is the tit-bit, and is covered with a
fat of firmer consistence and more delicate
flavour, than that on the body. But the
manatus is too human to be pleasant. "It
appears horrible," says Mr. Lund Simmons
in his Curiosities of Food, "to chew and
swallow the flesh of an animal which holds
its young (it has never more than one at a
litter) to its breast—which is formed exactly
like that of a woman—with paws resembling
human hands." The tongue of the sea-lion
(phoca jubata) is preferred by some to ox
tongue; and the heart is said to be equal to
roast calf's heart. The walrus has a tongue,
a heart, and a liver, all serviceable and
palatable, though we think the meat coarse
and strong; the female sea-bear is like
lamb, and its cub the very counterpart of
roast pig. Seal flesh we think strong and
oily; but we have already taken the
Greenlander's opinion on it. The black skin of
the whale, too, we have tasted, and found
its ebony cubes with the cocoa-nut flavour
simply delicious, but its coarse red flesh
like inferior meat. Porpoise, or sea-pig, is
not to be despised by British sailors suffering
from salt junk and scurvy; but it is not
much sought after now, though in the days
when peacocks in their pride, swans, and
herons were at English tables, porpoises, or
sea-pigs, had their place of honour there as
well. All sea things have the recommendable
quality of being highly iodised. This is
one of the virtues of cod-liver oil; one of the
reasons why sea-side air is so good for the
scrofulous and consumptive; and almost the
sole benefit to be found in the Iceland moss,
once so famous as a specific against
consumption. Isinglass has also a fishy origin.
The court plaister of the chemists' shops is
isinglass and balsam spread on silk. Caviare is
the dried roe or salted spawn of fish; the
black, which is the best, comes from the
sturgeon, the red is from the grey mullet and
the carp. Botargo is a kind of caviare made
from the spawn of the red mullet, and of
great esteem in Sicily; the roe of the pollock
makes commendable bread, and the roe of the
methy (Eotha maculosa) can be baked into
biscuits, which are used in the fur countries
as tea-bread.

In Beloochistán the cattle are fed on a
compound of dates and dried fish; the inhabitants
living almost entirely on fish; and we here,
in England, fling hundreds of pounds of sprats
and other fish upon our fields to fertilise the
land, poison the air,and deprive some hungry
thousands of a dinner. The Atlantic tunny
is like veal, but drier and firmer; and the
sturgeon, so prized by Greece and Rome, is
also of the veal type; that is, like flesh without
blood. The sharp-nosed sturgeon is like
beef, very coarse, rank, and unsavoury. The
shark is dry and acid. Havana is the only
place where shark is openly sold in the
market, and the Chinese are the only people
who ascribe any specially invigorating virtues
to the fins and tail.

The Gold Coast negroes are all fond of
sharks; as they are of hippopotami and
alligators, and the Polynesians surfeit
themselves to indigestion and disease by their
love of sharks' flesh, quite raw.

Scotland, and some other northern
countries, eat the picked shark and the dog-fish. The
conger-eel, dried and grated, thickens soup
in catholic countries, and is a Jersey dainty,
tasting like veal. In Cornwall they make
conger-eels, as they do everything else, into
pies. The Chinooks dry a little fish—
something like a sardine—then burn it as a candle;
and the scales of the delicious and delicate
callipevi make exceedingly beautiful
ornaments.

Other people beside the Gold Coast negroes
feed on, and take pleasure in reptiles. We
ourselves eat one of the tribe when we devour
calipash and calipee. But though we revel in
turtle, we keep an adverse countenance to
tortoise; yet, half the soup eaten by travellers
in Italy and Sicily is made of land tortoise,
boiled down to its essence. In Trinidad,
and other of the West India islands, land
tortoises are in much repute; the eggs of the
close tortoise (testudo clausa) are held a
supreme delicacy in North America; and Sir
Walter Raleigh fed his fainting men on
"tortuggas eggs" while sailing up the Orinoco.

In both North and South America the salt-
water terrapin is a fat and luscious luxury, if
taken just at the close of summer, and its
eggs in their parchment-like skin—they have
no true shell—are always valued. The
hiccatee, New Holland's curious snake-necked
version of a tortoise, has a liver which would
send the pâté de foie gras of Strasbourg out
of the field altogether; while, of turtle the