e ancients
used asafetida as a seasoning, and what we have called "stercus
diaboli," the Asiatics have named the "food of the gods." The
inhabitants of Greenland drink the oil of the whale with as much
avidity as we would a delicate wine, and they eat blubber the mere
smell of which nauseates an European. In some nations of the lower
grade, insects, worms, serpents, etc., are considered edible. The
inhabitants of the interior of Africa are said to relish the flesh of
serpents and eat grubs and worms. The very earliest accounts of the
Indians of Florida and Texas show that "for food, they dug roots, and
that they ate spiders, ants' eggs, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes,
earth, wood, the dung of deer, and many other things." Gomara, in his
"Historia de les Indias," says this loathsome diet was particular to
one tribe, the Yagusces of Florida. It is said that a Russian peasant
prefers a rotten egg to a fresh one; and there are persons who prefer
game partly spoiled.

Bourke recalls that the drinking of human urine has often been a
religious rite, and describes the urine-dance of the Zunis of New
Mexico, in which the participants drink freely of their urine; he draws
an analogy to the Feast of the Fools, a religious custom of Pagan
origin which did not disappear in Europe until the time of the
Reformation. It is still a practice in some parts of the United States
to give children fresh urine for certain diseases. It is said that the
ordure of the Grand Lama of Thibet was at one time so venerated that it
was collected and worn as amulets.

The disgusting habit of eating human excrement is mentioned by Schurig,
who gives numerous examples in epileptics, maniacs, chlorotic young
women, pregnant women, children who have soiled their beds and,
dreading detection, have swallowed their ejecta, and finally among men
and women with abnormal appetites. The Indians of North America
consider a broth made from the dung of the hare and caribou a dainty
dish, and according to Abbe Domenech, as a means of imparting a flavor,
the bands near Lake Superior mix their rice with the excrement of
rabbits. De Bry mentions that the negroes of Guinea ate filthy,
stinking elephant-meat and buffalo-flesh infested with thousands of
maggots, and says that they ravenously devoured dogs' guts raw.
Spencer, in his "Descriptive Sociology," describes a "Snake savage" of
Australia who devoured the contents of entrails of an animal. Some
authors have