in Ancient Geography, an Ethiopian people, represented as inhabiting near the deserts, and to have fed on locusts. This latter circumstance their name imports; the word being compounded of the Greek ἀκρίς locust, and φάγειν to eat. We have the following account of them by Diodorus Siculus*. Their stature was lower than that of other men; they were meagre, and extremely black. In the spring, high west winds drove from the desert to their quarter locusts of an extraordinary size, and remarkable for the squalid colour of their wings. So great was the number of these insects, that they were the only sustenance of the barbarians, who took them in the following manner: At the distance of some stadia from their habitations there was a wide and deep valley. They filled this valley with wood and wild herbs, with which their country abounded. When the cloud of locusts appeared, which was driven on by the wind, they set fire to the fuel which they had collected. The smoke which arose from this immense fire was so thick, that the locusts in crossing the valley, were stifled by it, and fell in heaps on the ground. The passage of the locusts being thus intercepted for many days, they made a large provision of those insects. As their country produced great quantities of salt, they salted them, to render them more palatable, and to make them keep till the next season. This peculiar supply was their sole food: they had neither herds nor flocks. They were unacquainted with fishing; for they lived at a distance from the sea. They were very active, and ran with great swiftness. But their life was not of long duration; it exceeded not forty years. The close of their life was extremely miserable; for in their old age, winged lice of different, but all of ugly forms, bred in their bodies. This malady, which began in the breast and belly, soon spread through the whole frame. The patient at first felt an itching; and the agreeable sensation produced by his scratching of himself, preceded a most deplorable calamity.* For when those lice, which had bred in his body, forced their way out, they caused effusions of corrupt blood, with excruciating pains in the skin. The unhappy man, with lamentable cries, was industrious himself to make passages for them with his nails. In short these lice issued forth successively from the wounds made by the hands of the patient, as from a vessel full of holes, and in such numbers that it was impossible to exterminate them.—Whether this extraordinary and dreadful distemper was occasioned by the food of the inhabitants of this country, or by a peculiar quality of their climate, it is difficult to determine. Indeed, as to the credibility of the whole account, we must leave the reader to judge.

But though the circumstances of these people should be deemed fabulous, yet may the acridophagia be true. It is well known, that to this day the inhabitants of Ethiopia, Arabia, &c., frequently use locusts for food. Acridophagi.

The reader will not be displeased if we lay before him the result of Dr Hasselquist’s inquiries as to this particular, 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, 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 Mr. 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 fricasse; which he says is not disagreeably tasted, for he had sometimes tasted these locust fricasses out of curiosity.

A later traveller, Dr Sparman, informs us*, *Voyage to the Cape, more unpolished and remote hordes of the Hottentots; vol. i. p. 36. when, as sometimes happens, after an interval of 8, 10, 15, or 20 years, they make their appearance in incredible numbers. At these times they come from the north, migrating to the southward, and do not suffer themselves to be impeded by any obstacles, but fly boldly on, and are drowned in the sea whenever they come to it. The females of this race of insects, which are most apt to migrate, and are chiefly eaten, are said not to be able to fly; partly by reason of the shortness of their wings, and partly on account of their being heavy and distended with eggs; and shortly after they have laid these in the sand, they are said to die. It is particularly of these that the Hottentots make a brown coffee-coloured soup, which at the same time acquires from the eggs a fat and greasy appearance. The Hottentots are highly rejoiced at the arrival of these locusts, though they are sure to destroy every bit of verdure on the ground: but the Hottentots make themselves ample amends for this loss, by falling foul on the animals themselves, eating them in such quantities as in the space of a few days to get visibly fatter and in better condition than before.*

The Abbé Poiret, also, in his Memoir on the Insects of Barbary and Numidia, informs us, “That the Moors make locusts a part of their food; that they go to hunt them; fry them in oil and butter; and sell them publicly at Tunis, at Bonne,” &c.

From these accounts, we may see the folly of that dispute among divines about the nature of St John’s food in the wilderness: some maintaining the original word to signify the fruits of certain trees; others, 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 authors as the above.