par dessus
d'une farce de beurre frais manipule avec un fin hachis de persil,
cerfeuil, ail, echalote, sel et poivre. Avant de servir, faire
chauffer au four."]

[Footnote 196: Reading LXXX _quadrantes_. A comparison may be made of
this capacity with that of the ordinary snail known to the Romans,
for their smallest unit of liquid measure was called a _cochlear_, or
snail shell, and contained.02 of a modern pint, or, as we may say,
a spoonful: indeed the French word _cuiller_ is derived from
_cochlear_.]

[Footnote 197: It is perhaps well to remind the American reader that the
European dormouse (_Myoxus glis_. Fr. _loir_. Ger. _siebenschlafer_)
is rather a squirrel than a mouse, and that he is still esteemed a
dainty edible, as he was by the Romans: indeed when fat, just before
he retires to hibernate, he might be preferred to 'possum and other
strange dishes on which some hospitable Americans regale themselves
and the patient palates of touring Presidents. In his treatise _De re
culinaria_ Apicius gives a recipe for a ragout of dormice which sounds
appetizing.]

[Footnote 198: Darwin (_Animals and Plants_, XVIII) says: "I have never
heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity."]

[Footnote 199: Varro makes no mention of tea and bread and butter as
part of the diet of a dormouse; so we are better able to understand
his abstinence at the mad tea party in _Alice in Wonderland_. As
Martial (III, 58) calls him _somniculosus_, it is probable that his
table manners on that occasion were nothing new and that his English
and German names were always justified.]

[Footnote 200: This is one of Varro's puns which requires a surgical
operation to get it into one's head. Appius is selected to talk about
bees because his name has some echo of the sound of _apis_, the word
for bee.]

[Footnote 201: The study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as
it is to us. There have survived from among many others the treatises
of Aristotle, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny, but they are all
made up, as Maeterlinck has remarked, of "erreurs charmantes," and for
that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage
in the mellifluous verses of the fourth _Georgic_, which follow Varro
closely.]

[Footnote 202: He might have said also that the hexagonal form of
construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result
with the least labour and material. Maeterlinck rehearses (_La Vie des
Abeilles_, 138) t