Health - sowing Snails
A soldier just returned from a Japanese prison camp has told how an ingenious member of the camp saved the health and perhaps the life of the prisoners by the making of a snail farm. The Society of Conchologists has long urged us not to neglect snails--escargots, if not colirnacons. -One.of them wrote, angrily of " the wicked waste involved in the spectacle of great big snails crawling about unmolested and un- eaten." The large, fat Roman snail as still to be found in Britain, and several species have constant epithets that make the mouth water: Pomatia and Nemoralis are perhaps the most succulent. So far as I remember, the Swiss Family Robinson delighted in sandwiches of snails inserted between the halves of a fried potato, a luxury doubtless of high dietetic virtue and rich in vitamins. Such refinements were not possible for the prisoners'; but the snails did, in fact, prove of no little value, and it was recorded that only one prisoner kecked at the offer. In the same camp an heroic Colonel, escaping through the entanglement, secured a few cocoanuts from a neighbouring tree ; but so watchful ..were the suspicious sentries that he ;had to sit up in the shelter of the tree for six consecutive hours before returning with his booty. -
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