HKB
a venomous liquor or froth, wherein they lay and deposite their eggs, which bore and perforate these excrescences, when the worms are hatch’d, so as we see them in galls.
What benefit the mast does universally yield (once in two years at least) for the fatting of hogs and deer, I shall shew upon another occasion, before the conclusion of this Discourse. A peck of acorns a day, with a little bran, will make an hog (’tis said) increase a pound-weight per diem for two months together. They give them also to oxen mingled with bran, chop’d or broken; otherwise they are apt to sprout and grow in their bellies. Others say, they should first be macerated in water, to extract their malignity; cattle many times perishing without this preparation. Cato advises the husband-man to reserve 240 bushels of acorns for his oxen, mingled with a like quantity of beans and lupines, and to drench them well. But in truth they are more proper for swine, and being so made small, will fatten pidgeons, peacocks, turkeys, pheasants and poultry; nay ’tis reported, that some fishes feed on them, especially the tunny, in such places of the coast where trees hang over arms of the sea. Acorns, esculus ab esca (before the use of wheat-corn was found out) were heretofore the food of men, nay of Jupiter himself, (as well as other productions of the earth) till their luxurious palats were debauched: And even in the Romans time, the custom was in Spain to make a second service of acorns and mast, (as the French now do of marrons and chesnuts) which they likewise used to rost under the embers.
........Fed with the oaken mast The aged trees themselves in years surpass’d.{57:1}
And men had indeed hearts of oak; I mean, not so hard, but health, and strength, and liv’d naturally, and with things easily parable and plain.
Blest age o’th’ world, just nymph, when man did dwell Under thy shade, whence his provision fell; Sallads the meal, wildings were the dissert: No tree yet learn’d by ill-example, art, With insititious fruit to symbolize, As in an emblem, our adulteries.{58:1}