Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/54

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moisture that remained upon them after casting their sloughs, they reassumed their former voracity, with an addition both of strength and agility. Yet they continued not long in this state before they were entirely dispersed, as their parents were before, after they had laid their eggs; and as the direction of the marches and flights of them both was always to the northward, and not having strength, as they sometimes had, to reach the opposite shores of Italy, France, or Spain, it is probable they perished in the sea: a grave which, according to these people, they have in common with other winged creatures. The locust, I conjecture, was the noisome beast, or the pernicious destructive animal, as the original words may be interpreted, which, with the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, made the four sore judgments that were threatened against Jerusalem. The Jews were allowed to eat them; and, indeed, when sprinkled with salt and dried, they are not unlike in taste to our fresh-*water crayfish."

Among the fish on the coast of Barbary the most curious is the penna marina, or sea-feather, which the fishermen sometimes find entangled in the meshes of their nets; and which, during the night, is so remarkably glowing and luminous as to enable the fishermen to discover by their light the size and quantity of the other fish which may happen to be enclosed within the same net.

In his remarks upon the moral condition of the inhabitants of Tunis and Algiers, he informs us that the sciences which were formerly so assiduously cultivated by the Moors are now neglected or despised: but they have still, as of old, a passion for poetry and music, and many a wandering dervish, like the [Greek:Aoidoi], or chapsists of antiquity, excites the admiration and generosity of the Moorish Arabs, by his enthusiastic improvisatores, accompanied by the rude notes of the Arabelbah, or bladder and string. Wild nations, whose feelings and passions are al-