BOOKS.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATURAL HISTORY BY A RURAL D.D.*

REPRINTS of newspaper articles are not always interesting, but there is one especial exception to the rule, and that is when the articles reproduced contain a popular cream on subjects, though technical, of popular interest, extracted by a competent writer from a large number of volumes, more or less uninviting to the general reader. The Contributions to Natural History, republished in a very convenient shape by a Rural D.D., certainly deserve all the immunities of this exception, for they were chiefly re- views contributed to the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, which comparatively few readers get hold of, and, as this circumstance alone implies, they treat of books still less accessible, and apparently less inviting, than the agricultural journals themselves. Most subjects gain by cumulation, and the cumulative interest of these lively essays on natural history in relation to food is all the greater at the present moment, when it seems doubtful whether we are not on the eve of losing half our cattle. To use the words of the author, " the alimentary virtues of horse- flesh and fungi are discussed with half-earnest levity. I use the language of earnest conviction when directing public attention to the great storehouse within which the Univer- sal Parent has laid up exhaustless supplies of food. We may be squeamish as to the eating of cheval soup and other dainty pre- parations from the flesh of the horse, fear may hinder us feasting on fungi, but with the sea ai our fish-pond, and pisciculture capable of endless development alike in salt water and in fresh, it is marvellous that multitudes should be pining with hunger in a land like ours, literally set in an ocean of plenty." Of course we have the additional advantage in the reprint of knowing, what we might not have found out otherwise, to wit, that in some cases the author used the appropriate colours of " half-earnest levity,"— a literary chiaroscuro, say, of levity,—elsewhere, the deeper tones and broader hues of earnest conviction, &c. It is no joke to say, considering how highly we think of these essays, that we really are obliged for the information, and think the Rural D.D. very good for telling us. For although in his later preface he smiles at cheval soup, no one reading the earlier article which follows the preface would guess that he did not worship it.

First, there is the tentative article, " Hippophagy ; or, Should We Eat our Horses 2" a very straightforward and downright question, to which all the little boys in the country with Shetland ponies, and all the ladies with pet saddle-horses, and all the sportsmen with favourite hunters will unquestionably answer, " Thank you, no." Itut the author is not to be put down by a mere negative, and the interrogative article is followed by an affirmative plea in the shape of "The Progress of Hippophagy ; a Plea for Eating Horse-flesh." And why not? " In the year 1857 the D.D. was converted to the derided faith of the hippo- phagi." Oh, you may laugh ! But he tells us so totidem verbis at the beginning of his plea. And listen to the sequel of his conver- sion. He was converted. " In the year 1857 we were con- verted." Up to that time he had asked many questions. But now he was satisfied, and told his satisfaction to all who would hear. Unfortunately, though he believed in the spirit, he had not eaten horse in the flesh. " We wel% not practically hippopha- gous." A lady, womanlike, preferring practice to profession, whom he fain would have converted, met him with the constant rejoinder, " Eat a horse, and I'll believe you." This was perhaps not unanswerable like many female arguments, but it was plausible. The D.D. meditated a pilgrimage to the banquet hippophagique on the Continent, but he had the good luck on the way to be able to " eat a horse " at home. Thenceforward all lingering doubts were dispelled, and in the ardent language of young apostolate a D.D. preached hippophagy, until in 1865, eight years after conversion, he prefaces all his past ardent propagandism with the epithet, of "half- earnest levity." We prefer to overlook the later epithet, and accept the earlier articles as the true internal voice of the man. And to every farmer in the kingdom, in the eloquent language of the preacher, we cry, " Satisfy yourself as to the agreeable and nutri- tious qualities of horse-flesh by eating it on the first opportunity.

• Contributions to Natural Ilistorg, chitty in Relation to the Food of Us! People. By a Rural D.D. Edinburgh : Blackwood.

Listen to what is done abroad, and do not turn up your noses against the voice of instruction. Horse-flesh is freely eaten atYienna and in many other Continental cities. It is on tho point of being largely consumed in France. Do not be carried away by the cant objection against eating your old friends. The horse-flesh-eating movement is mainly promoted by the Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals. Last year the society bought healthy worn-out horses, to accustom the poor to eat them. M. Ducoux, formerly Prefect of Police and Director of the Cab Company, subscribed a horse in kind—a fine, old, healthy, worn-out cab-horse. The Countess de Cldrambault was to give another. (Has she done so?) France contains 3,000,000 horses, renewed every 15 years, or one-fifteenth per annum. A fifteenth part of these three millions, with neces- sary deductions, handed over to the butcher, will give 150,000 horses, or the equivalent of 100,000 head of cattle. British statistics give 2,250,000 horses for the British Empire. Much of this is now wasted. Avail yourselves of it so far as practicable, and in order that it may no longer be wasted, dismiss the silly prejudice which causes even a half-starved labourer to exhibit irrepressible disgust when exhorted to partake of a kind of food occasionally within his reach, and known to possess in abundance those elements of nutrition so scantily supplied by the common fare of the working classes." But, stammers the farmer, how does it feel? If I eat my old cart-horses, how will they taste? Listen to a D.D. Here is the result of a banquet hippophagique. " Side by side are the subjects to be experimented on—the matters to be

compared :— "Horse soup—Beef soup.

Horse-boil—Beef-boil. Roast-horse—Roast-beef.

" CHORUS OF EXCLAMATIONS.

"Horse-soup—General astonishment ! It's perfect ! it's excel- lent it's feeding ! it's like venison ! it's aromatic ! it's rich- tasted ! it's a first-rate and admirable soup ! (Exclamations which seem to us rather coarse and very greedy.) " Beef-soup—Damned with faint praise.

"Boiled-horse—Very eatable ; not quite so good as boiled beef. (A magnanimous admission.) " Roast-horse—An explosion of satisfaction. Nothing finer, more delicate, or more tender.

"Summing up:—Soup—superior. Boil—good, and very eatable. Roast—exquisite."

Let us add, with the author, that " most satisfactory meals have been made upon animals from seventeen up to twenty-five years old." So there is really no limit to the time at which our horses can be utilized. A good, old cart-horse or carriage-horse, turned out to grass for three or four months, after ten years' service, will grow beautifully fat, and make rich, excellent soup, the flavour being heightened by age. Very soon the hall and the rectory or vicarage and the farm will become reconciled to eating their own cart and carriage-horses and hunters after due service, as becomes their superior enlightenment. But if they hesitate, why not make the Sunday-school children lead the van on holiday feist days, and give them roast horse and plum-pudding. Now if a Rural D.D. accuses us of writing with a "half-earnest levity," we must in- vite him to be good enough to wait for our confession—till we make it, as we were good enough to wait for his.

Hippophagy is followed by " Mycophagy ; or, Should We Eat Funguses ?" The answer is, " By all means." " Of all vegetable productions they are the most azotized—that is, animalized—in their structure." " Many of them, in addition to sugar, gum, resin, a peculiar acid called fungic acid, and a variety of salts, furnish considerable quantities of albumen, adipocere, and osmazome, the principle which communicates its peculiar flavour to meat gravy." " They absorb oxygen largely, and disengage in return carbonic acid, or else hydrogen, and some azotic gas." They are in fact " Vegetable Beefsteaks !" There is the Boletus Edulis, which, if we are to credit what we read, is a feast for fairies ; and Agaricus Procerus, much better than the common mushroom for ketchup ; and Agaricus Oreades, famous for the flavour it imparts to rich soups ; and Cantharellus Avarius, which Battara thinks, " in soup," " will raise the dead ;" and Morchella Escuknta, the rich man's luxury ; and Fistulina Hepatica, the poor man's fungus (it weighs 8 lb. !), and—but as D.D. stops to take breath, so will we. But if he will send us specimens, and pledge his word of honour as a gentleman that they are what they profess to be, we

will taste them. _ On the subject of fish, a D.D. gets into deeper water, and tum- bles about in the " Universal Parent's great ocean and storehouse of the food of mankind" with the graceful energies of that most graceful of creatures the porpoise, and all the delight of the very fish themselves. " Let philosophers proclaim,"

he says, "that we ought to know ourselves, I say that it is a national duty that we should know our fish." And certainly he has applied himself with much success to that branch of ethics. It is refreshing to find the incapacity of so-called "prac- tical men " to observe accurately and reason justly on matters with which they pride themselves on being so conversant. A tackaman of very extensive fishings mistook the parasitic tape-worm for the food of the salmon. Another " practical man " declares that fish digest as rapidly as fire burns. (Talking of rapid digestion, leeches, it seems, digest so slowly that they only require to be fed two or three times a year, which appears to the present re- viewer an approach to the paradise of feeding, for of all tiresome necessities commend him to the bother of eating and drinking. But this by the way.) To return, where practical men were at fault, many philosophers have been little better off. Helmont, for instance, asserts, says a D.D., that eels come from May dew. " Cut up two turves, covered with May dew, and lay one upon the other, the grassy sides inwards, and thus expose them to the heat of the sun: in a few hours there will be sprung from them an infinite quantity of eels." A D.D. himself has in younger days put horse-hair from a stallion's tail in water, hoping to reap there- from a fine supply of young eels.

The life of a salmon is a very elaborate performance, in which, however, we are forcibly reminded of the story of the Dutchman, who wishing to jump over a mountain, took a run of three miles to effect his purpose, but finding himself out of breath when he reached the bottom, he sat down and walked over at his lei- sure. The life itself of the salmon is plain sailing enough, but the disquisition on his generation certainly is a run of three miles, with a mountain to jump at the end. Having run the three miles, we are in no condition to jump, but are fain to ask in all humility, " Then how is a salmon really produced, after all?" The reader is apt to imagine that the only thing quite certain about the matter is that a salmon really does begin somewhere, somehow, but how or where is not revealed to mortal wit. The growth of the salmon and not his origin is really the gist of the matter in relation to food, and that is truly prodigious. A young salmon fifteen months old, weighing half an ounce, dismissed in May 1855 from the artifi- cial breeding-beds at Stormontfield, after having the dead fin cut off, was taken by the net fifty-one days later on its return from the sea, having grown nineteen odd inches in length, ten inches odd in girth, and in weight FIVE POUNDS SEVEN OUNCES AND A HALF. Another fish had grown from about an Ounce to NINE POUNDS. Thus salmon fit for the market can be artificially reared in twenty months from the deposition of the ova. In opposition to the Quarterly reviewer, a D.D. maintains, we think successfully, that "as a commercial speculation the ex- periment will prove remunerating, provided it be carried out on an extensive scale." The Quarterly reviewer had maintained that there was not a millionth chance in favour of the return of a salmon from the sea. The subsequent "Statistics of the Stor- montfield Pond " showed :—

1st. That of the marked fish liberated from the pond, four per cent. were recaptured either as grilse or salmon.

2nd. More than 300,000 were artificially reared and liberated ; forty out of every thousand were re-captured. It follows that 12,000 of the salmon taken in the Tay were pond-bred fish.

3rd. The average annual capture of Tay salmon and grilse is 70,000.

As a corollary to these facts, it is not surprising to learn that the rental of the Tay fishings rose 10 per cent. Why, then, let us ask with the author, are the Stormontfield feeding-ponds restricted to a quarter of an acre ? Why are the methods so successfully applied to the Tay not applied to every British river? Why are the 180 miles of canals in Scotland fishless? Why are the water company who own the Compensation Pond among the Pentland Hills blind to the lesson of Lake Wenern ? Why is the little Loch of Lindores not made available near the estuary of the Tay ?

It is a pleasant volume, masculine and racy, a trifle too buoyant perhaps in a literary point of view ; but fish and food, and the various perspectives opened up into the gastronomy of the future, pet-hunter soup, carriage-horse steak, saddle of lady's horse, Shet- land-pony cutlets, and fillet of colt, all these are subjects sufficiently buoyant and lively to excuse a few hops and capers of style. Of the twenty odd essays in the pretty volume, we have touched upon two or three only. There is an article on " Leeches and Leech-culture " which ladies will delight in, the details are so pleasant and so nicely put; and indeed leech- culture would add considerably to the -wealth and natural brutality of many poor parts of the country. Thus in France the leeches are fed on live

horses, cows, and donkeys, and often not in the best health, which on the Sangrado supposition ought to be considered a singular and exceptional boon to the animals fed upon. But a leading French authority, whose sensibility mourns over the many poor donkeys who die in spite of that blessing, nevertheless recommends thatthey iffiould always be in good health,—for the sake of the leeches! "Just," our author remarks, "as the friend of the cannibal might from anxiety about his health counsel him only to feed on healthy men !" Will a D.D. permit us to suggest in conclusion that in some places he seems to have cared less for syntax than for natural history, and less for sense than for either? For how is this to be construed? "Perched on the kitchen chimney-pot, the cry of ' The gulls are come !' sent all the boys of the family to the favourite amusement of feeding the gulls." What was perched on the chimney-tops? The cry, or the gulls, or the boys, or the family, or the favourite amusement ? First, we thought, and a friend to whom we showed the passage, thought the boys were perched on the chimney-pot—then the gulls—and then, as we did not see how they could be fed on the chimney-pot, we gave it up. But this is not the author's usual style.