signifies locust-eaters. It has been much disputed whether the inhabitants of Arabia, Ethiopia, &c., ever eat locusts. We shall give the substance of what Hasselquist says on this subject, who travelled in Syria and Egypt so late as the year 1752. This ingenious gentleman, who travelled with a view to improve natural history, informs us, that he asked Franks, and many other people who had lived long in these countries, whether they had ever heard that the inhabitants of Arabia and Ethiopia, &c., used locusts as food. They answered that they had. He likewise asked the same question of Armenians, Copts, and Syrians, who lived in Arabia, and had travelled in Syria and near the Red-sea; some of whom said they heard of such a practice, and others that they had often seen the people eat these insects. He at last obtained complete satisfaction on this head from a learned sheik at Cairo, who had lived six years in Mecca. This gentleman told him, in presence of M. le Grand, the principal French interpreter at Cairo, and others, that a famine frequently rages at Mecca when there is a scarcity of corn in Egypt, which obliges the inhabitants to live upon coarser food than ordinary: That when corn is scarce, the Arabians grind the locusts in hand-mills, or stone mortars, and bake them into cakes, and use these cakes in place of bread: That he has frequently seen locusts used by the Arabians, even when there was no scarcity of corn; but then they boil them, stew them with butter, and make them into a kind of fricassee, which he says is not disagreeably tasted; for he had sometimes tasted these locust-fricassees out of curiosity. From this account, we may see the folly of that dispute among divines about the nature of St John's food in the wilderness. Some of them say that locusts were the fruits of certain trees, others that they were a kind of birds, &c.; but those who adhered to the literal meaning of the text were at least the most orthodox, although their arguments were perhaps not so strong as they might have been, had they had an opportunity of quoting such an author as Hasselquist.