This farm was visited in 1896. It then had sixty to eighty thousand snails, all alike, except that some were slightly darker than others.
The farm consists of a large meadow fenced in from the road by boards a foot high. The owner employs people to collect snails from the neighbouring woods and meadows. They bring in from one to two thousand daily, commencing about April.
The snails are placed at once on one-half of the meadow and left to graze until July, when they are removed to the other half of the field. This is all divided up into squares like a gigantic chess-board by boards a foot high. Each square has a thick bed of moss on which the snails are placed, to be fed on cabbages for three months. They become very fat and large, and of a greenish colour, like the cabbage. Toward the end of September the snails begin to burrow down through the moss so that they are completely hidden. They lie there with the openings up ward until they have completely closed themselves for the winter, forming a hard cover over the mouth of the shell. It is in this condition that they are exported, as they can now be kept till required.
The price the farmer gets for the sealed shells is seventeen francs ($3.4o) per thousand, and ten francs OW for the open ones, which have to be used at once. All have to be dispatched to Troyes by the first of October, by which time all that were going to close will have done so. Some always remain open. From Troyes they are sent to Paris, where they come into season with the first frost.
The size of their snails was a matter of great pride to the Romans owning snail preserves, called cochlearia. Meal and new wine fattened them for market. On this diet, the snails of Hir pinus reached such size that a single shell held eighty-six penny pieces. Varro recommended that a ditch be dug around the snaileries to save the expense of a special slave to catch the runaways which scaled the walls.
Pliny the Younger reproaches his friend Septicius Clarus for breaking a dinner engagement with him, at which the menu was to have been a lettuce, three snails and two eggs apiece, barley water, mead and snow, olives, beet roots, gourds and truffles, and going off somewhere else where he got oysters, scal lops and sea urchins.—Cooke.
260 The Land Snails. Helices The European Spotted Snail (H. aspersa, Mull.) is a dingy,
vagabondish mollusk, hated by gardeners, whose choicest and tenderest plants it attacks by night in garden or greenhouse. The five-whorled shell is brownish yellow, with five dark brown bands made of spots, and a thick, white, recurved lip. The average shell is somewhat over an inch in diameter.
Blackbirds, thrushes and glow-worms conspire with man to exterminate this mollusk, but they merely check its ravages. Though eaten in England it is not a choice species. In America it is one of the most prosperous and best-hated of immigrant mollusks, as its appetite for vegetables and flowers is insatiable. I remember with what vindictive heel my neighbour in southern California crushed these destroyers of his nursery stock.
In the snailery a brood of these snails may be raised, and every step in the life history of each robust youngster watched from the egg. Vegetable food, such as lettuce and cabbage, should be growing for them, and their habits carefully observed. Nothing is more entertaining and instructive than this study. Two years brings the snail to maturity.
"Left-handed," or sinistral specimens of this species are worth looking for. They occur occasionally, and are greatly prized by collectors. There are plenty of enthusiasts ready to pay a guinea ($5) for every perfect adult shell.
If one keeps the subject in mind, and drops an inquiry here and there, he will gather quite a fund of curious information about the uses of snails from country folk of the old-fashioned sort who hoard traditions carefully. A walking trip through England will be especially productive, for that humid climate has always been favourable for these mollusks. If you chance to look pale and thin you will be told that a diet of live snails or slugs will cure consumption. 1 t will also build up the consti tutions of anxmic persons and sickly children. Snails are pre scribed by local physicians for a number of complaints, including asthma, dropsy, eye troubles, rheumatism and corns. Among recipes copied by Lovell from old books, I find the following: Snales which bee in shell beat together with bay salt and mallowes, and laid to the bottomes of your feet and to the wristes of your handes, before the fit cometh, appeaseth the ague.