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SOCIOLOGY TRANSFORMED
Series Editors: John Holmwood and
Stephen Turner

CHINESE
SOCIOLOGY
State-Building and
the Institutionalization
of Globally Circulated
Knowledge
Hon Fai Chen
 Sociology Transformed

Series editors
John Holmwood
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, UK

Stephen Turner
Department of Philosophy
University of South Florida
Tampa, USA

“In this concise and well-researched book, Chen Hon-Fai offers a fascinating
new conspectus of the discipline’s history and current situation. The role of the
state and transnational networks in shaping Chinese sociology are carefully ana-
lyzed. So too are the attempts of several pioneering individuals to indigenize the
discipline. Everywhere, the turbulent politics of China affects the sociological
scene. A stimulating contribution to the study of sociology as a global phenom-
enon, Chen Hon-Fai’s probing new book is highly recommended.”
—Peter Baehr, Professor of Social Theory, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

“Chinese Sociology is an essential analysis of the development of the discipline on

mainland China, adding to the existing literature on Hong Kong and Taiwan
with a historical imagination informed by an institutional perspective. Drawing
thoughtfully on the best current work in the sociology of ideas and knowledge,
Chen Hon-Fai manages to think comparatively and sociologically about main-
land Chinese sociology while also highlighting the contributions of the most
important Chinese scholars and their distinctive ideas, findings, research pro-
grams and institution building successes and challenges.”
—Neil McLaughlin, Professor of Sociology, McMaster University, Canada
The field of sociology has changed rapidly over the last few decades.
Sociology Transformed seeks to map these changes on a country by
country basis and to contribute to the discussion of the future of the
subject. The series is concerned not only with the traditional centres of
the discipline, but with its many variant forms across the globe.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14477
 Hon Fai Chen

Chinese Sociology
State-Building and the Institutionalization
of Globally Circulated Knowledge
Hon Fai Chen
Department of Sociology and Social
Policy
Lingnan University
New Territories, Hong Kong

Sociology Transformed
ISBN 978-1-137-58219-5 ISBN 978-1-137-58220-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58220-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949216

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th
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Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 Acknowledgements

I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to Peter Baehr. He suggested me

to write this book and helped me expand my studies in the comparative-
historical analysis of intellectual life. He is a respectable scholar, a reli-
able mentor, and an exemplary role model. Besides, I am grateful for the
series editors John Holmwood and Stephen Turner, for granting me this
good opportunity to write and reflect on the Chinese sociological tradi-
tion. My appreciation also goes to Neil MacLaughlin for his generous
comments at an initial stage of my research, and the anonymous review-
ers for their useful suggestions on the book project. I benefit a lot from
the discussions with my Lingnan colleagues during our informal lunch-
time seminars. I am indebted to the editorial and production teams for
their patience and professional assistance. Flora Lo, Man Kit, and Gary
Yip offer me indispensable help in preparing some of the primary data
and secondary literature for this study.
Last but not least, my academic career would not have begun ­without
the supports and guidance of Prof. Wong Suk-Ying of the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. A warm and pleasant family life is no less
­crucial for a young academic, and for that reason I dedicate this book to
my mother and my wife.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Achievement Without Coherence: The Rise of Chinese

Sociology 9

3 Dramatic Rebirth: The Suspension, Reestablishment,

and Institutionalization of Chinese Sociology 29

4 Paradigm Shift: Sociological Theory and the Studies

of Social Transformation 53

5 Diversity Within Limits: Post-positivism, Gender Studies

and the Sociology of Consumption 83

6 Friends, Not Enemies: The Globalization

and Indigenization of Chinese Sociology 107

7 Conclusion 133

Bibliography 139

Index 143

vii
 List of Tables

Table 6.1 Doctoral degrees of Chinese sociologists

in 8 major universities 111
Table 6.2 International collaborations by doctoral degrees
of Chinese sociologists in 8 major universities 112

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The history of Chinese sociology is a contingent process in

which globally circulated knowledge, above all the American sociologi-
cal tradition, has been adapted to the changing contexts of China from
the 1890s to the present. Since the beginning, Chinese sociologists have
devoted considerable efforts to assimilate the concepts, methods and
approaches of Western sociology while retaining their distinctive iden-
tity and addressing their specific problems. An institutional approach is
pertinent to the analysis of this historical and sociological process, as it
focuses on how academic community and its intellectual production are
being shaped by the state, universities, research institutes, professional
associations and other agencies.

Keywords American sociology · Chinese sociology

Globally circulated knowledge · Institutional approach
Knowledge assimilation and production

In many ways, Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) was the embodiment of

Chinese sociology and its development in the twentieth century. Fei was
among the first batch of Chinese students receiving a more systematic
local training in sociology, thanks to the incipient growth and institu-
tionalization of the discipline from the 1920s onward. He was graduated
from the Yanjing University, a renowned American-run liberal arts col-
lege that was the center of sociological research in China prior to 1949.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

H.F. Chen, Chinese Sociology, Sociology Transformed,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58220-1_1
2 H.F. Chen

Upon return from his overseas studies in Britain, Fei’s works on rural
China soon attained international fame and became the landmark of
the “Chinese school” of sociology. But after 1949, Fei’s fortune under-
went an abrupt reversal as “bourgeois sociology” constituted the target
of ideological attacks that culminated in the Cultural Revolution. After
almost three decades of total suspension, sociology’s potential value for
economic reform and socialist modernization was for the first time rec-
ognized by the socialist state. Sociology was thus reestablished and Fei’s
academic status restored, as he served as the leading representative of the
discipline in countless committees and delegations. This also marked the
beginning of a new and unprecedented level of policy and social inter-
vention on the part of Chinese sociologists: Fei himself was appointed as
the chief advisor of small town studies and development. Throughout his
life, Fei personified not only the ebb and flow of Chinese sociology, but
also its “problem consciousness,” that is, a practical emphasis on the use
of sociological knowledge for the effective solution of social problems. In
Fei’s own words, Chinese sociology was distinguished (and legitimized)
by its “realism in the pursuit of knowledge” (congshi qiuzhi).
Toward the end of his life, however, Fei showed a keen interest in the
fiction The Celestine Prophecy, a 1993 national bestseller by the American
novelist James Redfield translated into Chinese in 1997. Having read the
novel twice, Fei gave an account of his fascination during an interview in
2003. Generally unimpressed by literary works, his attention was never-
theless caught by the author’s name, James Redfield. Fei thought he was
the grandson of Robert Park, the American sociologist who in the early
1930s visited the Yanjing University and taught Fei about the impor-
tance of the direct observations of social life. Margaret Park Redfield,
putatively the novelist’s mother, was the editor of the English translation
of Fei’s Earthbound China and China’s Gentry, when Fei first visited the
USA in the early 1950s. Fei believed that he met little Redfield and his
parents during their visits in Tsinghua University and Yanjing University
in the same period. Though James Redfield later became a classics pro-
fessor at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago,
Fei’s hunch was that he could be the author of the novel. But the sis-
ter of James the classicist later clarified to Fei that he was mistaken (Fei
2003: 64–65).
Another reason for Fei’s interest in the novel resided in its popu-
larity in the USA, which seemed to confirm his emphasis on “cultural
self-awareness” at the final stage of his academic career. The Celestine
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Prophecy, according to Fei, was an attempt on the part of the Western

people to come to terms with their own culture and its problems
such as secularism, materialism, and the unrestrained exploitation of
earth resources. Fei was particularly drawn to its prophecies regarding
the coming crisis and great awakening of the world at the turn of the
twenty-first century. Though remaining within the Christian framework
of brotherly love, the novel proposed that birth control, automation,
and communism could be some possible ways to redeem the humankind.
These directions, Fei believed, concurred with the current policies and
developments of China (Fei 2003: 64–67).
For Fei, therefore, The Celestine Prophecy was interesting because it
was not a novel in the conventional sense; in Fei’s reading, it was a self-
conscious reflection on Western culture by an author deeply familiar with
the course of Western history. The novel was in fact an anthropological
essay in literary guise (Fei 2003: 68). One might wonder if Fei was again
fundamentally mistaken, this time about the novel’s genre. In the eyes of
the Western readers, The Celestine Prophecy was composed in the spirit of
Eastern mysticism underlying the New Age movement. Fei was not alto-
gether unaware of the mystic element in the work, as he was at the time
reflecting upon what Chen Yinke, a renowned Chinese historian, once
called “ecstasy and contemplation” (shenyou mingxiang) in prefacing a
great intellectual piece. But Fei understood it not so much as a flowing
state than a capacity to see through the appearance to perceive the essen-
tial truth. According to Fei, his conclusion was inspired by Robert Park’s
dissatisfaction with Franklin Giddings’ behavioral approach to sociol-
ogy (ibid.: 61–62). An exotic but somewhat common experience for the
Chinese humanities scholars was inadvertently reinterpreted from the
rational-critical perspective of American sociology.
Despite (or rather because of) Fei’s misreading of the novel, this
anecdote served to reveal the rich fabric of Sino-American intellectual
exchanges in the twentieth century and the enduring problem of the
cross-cultural diffusion of ideas and knowledge. It was startling to rec-
ognize that Fei’s encounter with Robert Park was so profound, both
personally and academically, that it could not fail to channel his inter-
est toward “literary” work in the last years of his life. But the forma-
tive experience of American and more broadly Western sociology did not
imply forgetfulness on Chinese culture and identity. Imported ideas were
assimilated, consciously or not, to the bedrock of Chinese experiences in
technological, economic, social, political, and cultural development. But
4 H.F. Chen

the converse was also true: the rational-critical ethos of Western sociol-
ogy was no less significant than the practical thrust of the Chinese intel-
lectual tradition in shaping Fei’s orientation and worldview. And yet the
two-way traffic was never smooth and straightforward, as the diffusion
and adaptation of sociological knowledge and its background assump-
tions were full of misunderstandings, be they creative or not.
This study aims to chart the history in which globally circulated socio-
logical knowledge is adapted to China’s peculiar and ever shifting intel-
lectual-political context from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Ever since the inception of Chinese sociology, the problem of indigeniza-
tion or “sinicization” of Western intellectual frameworks has constituted
a core concern of Chinese scholars. Various attempts have been made to
assimilate the tenets of Western (in particular American) sociology while
retaining a Chinese intellectual identity. Instead of a simple and direct
transmission of knowledge, the making of Chinese sociology as an aca-
demic discipline involved the selection and synthesis of particular con-
cepts, theories, and methods. How successive generations of Chinese
sociologists explored different models of sociological knowledge, what
choices they made, and the diverse strategies on which they embarked
to promote disciplinary growth, warrants an extended and analytical
treatment. On the basis of a detailed historical investigation, this study
seeks to contribute to a cross-cultural optic on the emergence and fate
of sociological traditions. The histories of American, British, French, and
German sociology have already been amply scrutinized; more recently,
those experiences have been complemented by fine studies of less known
yet vibrant traditions in countries such as Australia, Portugal, and South
Africa (Harley and Wickham 2014; Silva 2016; Sooryamoorthy 2016). A
comparable history of the Chinese case is timely. It promises to enlarge
this growing body of comparative literature and offer new insights into
how sociological traditions of the West were and are appropriated in the
making of non-Western sociology.
While focusing on a non-Western case, this study augments the insti-
tutional approach characteristic of historical accounts of Western sociol-
ogy. According to my understanding, to follow the institutional approach
is to treat sociological knowledge as the historical product of intellectual
communities, which are shaped by the state, universities, research insti-
tutes, professional associations, and other agencies of higher education.
Studies in the broad tradition of sociology of knowledge, inaugurated by
Karl Mannheim (1936) and developed by Robert Merton (1970), have
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

sought to illuminate the relationship between structural conditions and

intellectual outcomes. Exemplary works in this tradition include Randall
Collins’ (1998) account of the rise and fall of philosophical systems in
terms of the intellectual competition for limited attention space, Pierre
Bourdieu’s (1988) analysis of the French academic field and the struggle
for symbolic power therein, and Charles Camic’s (1986, 1989) historical
essays on the cognitive and social processes in the formation of American
social sciences. Recently, Camic et al. (2011) employ the sociology of
knowledge in dialogue with the burgeoning field of science studies. The
latter’s emphasis on the role of scientific practice (Latour 1986; Barnes
et al. 1996) can be readily extended from the realm of natural science
and technology to social scientific knowledge (MacKenzie et al. 2008).
Despite the variety of concepts and approaches, a primary aim of the
sociology of knowledge is to inquire how the production of knowledge
is shaped by social and existential conditions (Merton 1945). This study
focuses on the institutional factors.
Stimulated by these works, this study will examine the development
of Chinese sociology by highlighting the historical and institutional fac-
tors shaping its course. More analytically, I will chart the material, sym-
bolic and organizational resources, including funding supports, cultural
and intellectual traditions, and networks, associations, and other forms
of social relationship that were available for Chinese sociologists in seek-
ing to advance and institutionalize sociological knowledge. How major
shifts in state policy shape the allocation of these resources and thereby
the course of Chinese sociology will constitute the focus of this study.
While there are impressive studies on the history of Chinese sociology
(some notable examples are Wong 1979; Cheng and So 1983; Zhang
1992; Yan 2004; Dirlik et al. 2012; Qi 2016), they mostly offer a gen-
eral overview of the discipline. The hazy treatment of the disciplinary
past is reinforced by the increasing professionalization of Chinese sociol-
ogy from the 1990s onward, which has served to legitimize a positivist
conception of knowledge accumulation as linear progress. What remains
to be analyzed is the relationship between institutional and intellectual
changes underlying the formation and transformation of sociology in
China. While this problem is also central to post-colonial studies, the
advantage of an institutional approach resides in its openness regarding
the relative autonomy of disciplinary development vis-à-vis its material,
social, and organizational basis.
6 H.F. Chen

In the following chapters, I will follow the chronological order of the

historical development of Chinese sociology, while at the same time pur-
suing particular themes in the production and transformation of socio-
logical knowledge. I will begin with the formation of Chinese sociology
from 1898 to 1949, during which some initial efforts were made to
institutionalize the discipline (Chap. 2). Then I will proceed to review
the suspension of sociology in Mao’s China from 1953 to 1979 and
its subsequent reestablishment throughout the 1980s. How a central-
ized institutional matrix revolving around the state was established, and
how various cultural, political, and social resources were mobilized, will
be examined (Chap. 3). The following two chapters will be devoted to
an intellectual history of some leading and emerging fields of study in
Chinese sociology. A paradigm shift from modernization to marketiza-
tion theory occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century, which was
largely triggered by a group of American Chinese scholars. The paradigm
shift had repercussions not only on the studies of social stratification and
social transformation, but also on methodology, gender studies, and soci-
ology of consumption (Chaps. 4 and 5). Our discussion will then move
to the aspects of globalization and indigenization, which unfold along-
side each other in the case of Chinese sociology. While transnational
research networks are established with professional and public sociolo-
gists in America, Hong Kong, and mainland China, Chinese sociologists
are looking back to their disciplinary history for past lessons in indigeni-
zation (Chap. 6). Finally, the concluding chapter will sum up the study
by highlighting the role of the state and its negotiation with the aca-
demic sociologists.
To avoid undue complications and possible confusions, in this study
“Chinese sociology” will refer specifically to the sociology in mainland
China. The development of sociology in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
Macau will be discarded insofar as it does not impinge directly upon the
case of mainland China. The rationale lies in the diverse configurations
and trajectories of sociological development in these places, which had to
do with their colonial heritages among other historical and institutional
factors (see Tzeng 2012 for an excellent study of sociologies in Hong
Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore). A comparative-historical analysis of soci-
ological traditions in Chinese societies will be an interesting topic that
awaits future studies.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

References
Barnes, Barry, et al. 1996. Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. London:
Athlone.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Camic, Charles. 1986. The Matter of Habit. American Journal of Sociology 91
(5): 1039–1087.
Camic, Charles. 1989. Structure After 50 Years: The Anatomy of a Charter.
American Journal of Sociology 95 (1): 38–107.
Camic, Charles, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont (eds.). 2011. Social Knowledge
in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cheng, Lucie, and Alvin So. 1983. The Reestablishment of Sociology in the
PRC: Toward the Sinification of Marxian Sociology. Annual Review of
Sociology 9: 471–498.
Collins, Randall. 1998. Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual
Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Dirlik, Arif, et al. (eds.). 2012. Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-
century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism. Hong Kong: Chinese
University Press.
Fei, Xiaotong. 2003. Shiji Laoren De Hua: Fei Xiaotong Juan [Words of
Century-Old Men: Fei Xiaotong], ed. Lin Xiang and interviewed by Zhang
Guansheng. Shenyang: Liaoning Jiaoyu Chubanshe.
Harley, Kirsten, and Gary Wickham. 2014. Australian Sociology: Fragility,
Survival, Rivalry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.
Latour, Bruno. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
MacKenzie, Donald, et al. 2008. Do Economists Make Markets? On the
Performativity of Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge.
Merton, Robert. 1945. Sociology of Knowledge. In Twentieth-Century
Sociology, ed. Georges Gurvitch, and Wilbert E. Moore, 366–405. New York:
Philosophical Library.
Merton, Robert. 1970. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century
England. New York: H. Fertig.
Qi, Xiaoying (ed.). 2016. Special Issue: Sociology in China, Sociology of China.
Journal of Sociology 52 (1): 3–333
Silva, Filipe Carreira da. 2016. Sociology in Portugal: A Short History. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Sooryamoorthy, R. 2016. Sociology in South Africa: Colonial, Apartheid and
Democratic Forms. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
8 H.F. Chen

Tzeng, Albert. 2012. Framing Sociology in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore:
Geopolitics, States and Practitioners. Unpublished thesis, University of
Warwick, UK.
Wong, Siu-lun. 1979. Sociology and Socialism in Contemporary China. London:
Routledge and K. Paul.
Yan, Min. 2004. Yi Men Xueke Yu Yi Ge Shidai: Shehuixue Zai Zhongguo
[A Discipline and an Era: Sociology in China]. Beijing: Qinghua Daxue
Chubanshe.
Zhang, Chuo. 1992. Zhongguo Shehui he Shehuixue Bainianshi [A Hundred Year
History of Chinese Society and Sociology]. Hong Kong: Zhonghua Shuju.
 CHAPTER 2

Achievement Without Coherence: The Rise

of Chinese Sociology

Abstract In the formation of Chinese sociology prior to 1949,

American influences were significant but gradually diminishing in the
process of state-building. In the 1920s, overseas Chinese students were
returning from America and elsewhere to found sociological associations
and journals. Thanks to their linkages with the universities, foundations
and voluntary associations, Republican sociologists made steady progress
in the collection and analysis of social survey data. But the growth of
Chinese sociology began to fluctuate with the expansion of higher edu-
cation in the 1930s. Despite the standardization of curriculum and codi-
fication of knowledge, theoretical synthesis was increasingly decoupled
from empirical studies. Impressive works in community studies were pro-
duced, but the sociological discipline as a whole failed to articulate a sta-
ble basis of knowledge production.

Keywords American influences · Community studies

Higher education system · Social survey · State-building

Along with other social sciences, sociology was introduced in China at

the turn of the twentieth century, when the Qing dynasty was encoun-
tering relentless military attacks and imperialist offensives from the West.
The Chinese cultural and political elites were painstakingly searching
for a viable way to transform China into a modern nation comparable
in wealth and power to the “civilized” states of Europe, America, and

© The Author(s) 2018 9

H.F. Chen, Chinese Sociology, Sociology Transformed,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58220-1_2
10 H.F. Chen

Japan. It was under this world-historical context that Western sociology

came to be identified as the intellectual basis of a total reconstruction
of the social and political order in China. From 1898 to 1903, Yan Fu
translated and introduced Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology to the
Chinese literati. While the classics of Western liberalism, including for
instance Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the
Laws, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, constituted the main corpus of
Yan’s translation, he gave these works a nationalist reading in the form of
footnotes and commentaries. By highlighting collective rather than indi-
vidual freedom, Yan’s overall purpose was to alert his compatriots to the
universal forces of competition and evolution, and hence the necessity
and urgency of social, political, and cultural reforms (Schwartz 1964).
From the outset, the inception of Western sociology was entangled
with the political movements and ideological divides in China. Reformist
intellectuals invoked sociology in articulating their visions of “society”
(qun) as the moral and collective foundation of constitutional monar-
chy. Sociology was literally rendered as “the study of group” (qun xue),
which found a similar expression and hence a source of legitimacy in the
Confucian canon. Kang Youwei, the leader of the reform movement,
included qun xue in the curriculum of his private academy in 1891. Tan
Sitong, who belonged to the radical wing of the reformist intellectuals,
used the word “sociology” (shehui xue) in his philosophical and political
treatise An Exposition of Benevolence in 1896, though the term seemed to
be his personal invention rather than being adopted from the West (Sun
1948 [2010]: 9–10). Liang Qichao wrote a polemical essay on qun and
planned to follow up with a compendium on the same subject. As intel-
lectual and political activists, these proto-sociologists did not so much
observe than construct the object of society and the domain of sociology.
Above all, their ideas were put into practice in the so-called “study socie-
ties” (xuehui), which were joined by like-minded intellectuals and offi-
cials and regarded as a microcosm of society per se (Chen 2017).
Under the New Policy (xinzheng) of the Qing government in the
early years of the twentieth century, an increasing number of Chinese
students were pursuing overseas studies (Reynolds 1993). Owing to
physical and cultural proximity, Japan was one of the favorite destina-
tions for the Chinese students. The number of Chinese students in
Japan had been rapidly proliferating from 100 in 1899 to 8000–9000 in
1905–1906 (Harrel 1992: 2). Under the influence of Japanese teachers
and revolutionaries, the Chinese students were exposed to radical social
 2 ACHIEVEMENT WITHOUT COHERENCE: THE RISE … 11

thoughts such as anarchism and Marxism. They also learned about the
modern social sciences, particularly international law out of their con-
cern about the unequal treaties imposed on China. Sociology was also
of major interest, which was reimported from Japan to China with the
return of Chinese students. The previous reformist notion of qun xue
was soon superseded by shehui xue, a Japanese translation adopted and
popularized by the Chinese revolutionary Zhang Taiyan. Apart from fin-
ishing the first complete Chinese translation of Herbert Spencer’s The
Study of Sociology in 1902, Zhang also translated an introductory text by
the Japanese sociologist Nobuta Kishimoto in 1900 (Sun 1948 [2010]:
13–15, 300). Since then, various Japanese works came to be translated.
The works of American sociologists such as Lester Ward and Franklin
Giddings also appeared in China through secondary translation.
Despite its growing popularity among the radical Chinese intel-
lectuals, sociology was not formally taught in the university until
1906, when the first sociology courses were offered at the St. John’s
University in Shanghai (Dai 1993: 1; Ma 1998: 1). Foreign textbooks
were used without modification in accordance with the local circum-
stances in China. The Imperial Academy, which was the predecessor of
Peking University, listed sociology in its curriculum, but whether and
how it was delivered remained unascertainable. Thanks to the ideo-
logically charged climate, and the intellectual heritage of classicism in
late Qing, there had been few original or systematic attempts to pro-
duce scientific knowledge about Chinese society. What radical scholars
like Liu Shipei offered were mostly textual and philological studies of
Chinese history under the evolutionary framework of Social Darwinism
(Yao 2006). Sociology in the revolutionary period was nothing more
than a Spencerian philosophy of history stuffed with Chinese historical
materials.

American Influences and the Rise of Chinese

Sociological Community
In the decade after the 1911 revolution, the development of Chinese
sociology had borne the strong stamp of American institutions. Most
universities offering sociology courses were funded or run by American
missionaries, to the extent that some characterized early Chinese soci-
ology as “American missionary sociology” (Wong 1979: 11). In that
period, the missionary universities in China were governed by the laws
12 H.F. Chen

of Virginia, according to which they were granted the rights to design

their own curriculums. This arrangement offered the major impetus for
American missionaries to establish universities in China (ibid.: 13). In
1913, the first sociology department was set up at the Hujiang College
(Shanghai College) by the American Methodist Episcopalians. As of
1925, there were altogether 10 missionary universities that offered soci-
ology teaching. Among them, the most prestigious sociology department
and graduate school were hosted by the Yanjing University (Yenching
University). Since its founding in 1922, Yanjing sociology had offered
up to 31 courses, far outnumbering that of other missionary universi-
ties (King and Wang 1978: 38; Wong 1979). Local Chinese universities
such as Peking University and Qinghua University (Tsinghua University)
started to teach sociology as late as 1916 and 1917 respectively (Dirlik
2012: 3; King and Wang 1978: 38). In 1921, Xiamen University estab-
lished the first Chinese-run sociology department (more precisely a joint
department of history and sociology) in China (Ma 1998: 45; Li 2012:
69).
Apart from religious purposes, the educational activities of American
missionary universities aimed at a better understanding of Chinese soci-
ety and on that basis the implementation of social and moral reform.
To these ends, most of the teaching and research were delivered by
American missionaries cum sociology professors. An example was
Fr. George N. Putnam, who was assigned by the American Maryknoll
Mission to be sociology professor at Lingnan University in Guangzhou.
In Yanjing, John Stewart Burgess taught not only sociology but also
Christian ethics in the theology school. Burgess also collaborated actively
with other Christian institutions such as the Y.M.C.A. and the China
Association of Christian Higher Education. While Yanjing and other mis-
sionary universities deliberately refrained from explicit religious incul-
cation, a moral and practical emphasis was implanted in sociological
teaching and research in Republican China.
Apart from missionaries, some major universities in America also con-
tributed to the early development of sociology in China. Two notable
examples were the Princeton-Yenching Foundation and the Harvard-
Yenching Institute. Founded in 1906, Princeton-in-Peking bore the pur-
pose of delivering social services and studying urban conditions in China.
It was later moved to Yanjing and renamed the Princeton-Yenching
Foundation, which was devoted to studies in political science and sociol-
ogy. On top of this regular platform, every year Princeton sent out two
 2 ACHIEVEMENT WITHOUT COHERENCE: THE RISE … 13

sociologists to Yanjing and helped it set up the sociology department. In

a similar vein, Harvard and Yanjing co-founded the Harvard-Yenching
Institute in 1928, with the objective of promoting studies of Chinese
culture and facilitating inter-cultural exchanges (Wong 1979).
Another crucial support for early Chinese sociology came from the
Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), which was funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation. The institute was a non-governmental organization estab-
lished in the USA in 1925, which endeavored to promote democracy
through studying the societies of the Pacific peoples, including America,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan (Chiang 2001: 226).
In China, the IPR constituted one of the most important sources of
overseas financial support for social science development. Among the 8
countries it sponsored, China received the greatest amount of research
expenditure, specifically 164,913 US dollars out of a total sum of
316,953 (ibid.: 227). To further enhance the growth of social sciences
in China, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund started to offer
block grants to Yanjing University and Nankai University in 1928 and
1932 respectively (Wong 1979: 15). Between 1913 and 1934, China
was the largest non-American recipient country (USD 37,481,104) of
the Rockefeller Funds (Chiang 2001: 230). In 1934, the funding mode
changed to project-based grants, thereby offering an incentive for indi-
vidual Chinese sociologists and social scientists to bid research projects.
Research funding was also available from the Nationalist government,
but it was modest compared to American and international sponsorships
(Wong 1979: 34).
While American institutions assumed a predominant role in the
early development of Chinese sociology, the first generation of Chinese
sociologists were being trained up overseas. As these young scholars
were returning to China, a gradual shift took place in the composition
of the sociological community from the 1920s onward. The teach-
ing staffs in sociology had been mostly American, as the discipline was
mainly taught at the missionary universities. J.A. Dealey, D.H. Kulp II
and H.S. Bucklin of the Hujiang College, Rev. Wesley M. Smith of the
Soochow University, G. Dittmer of the Qinghua University and John
Steward Burgess of the Yanjing University were some notable exam-
ples. An exception was Kang Baozhong, a local Chinese scholar trained
in Japan and became a sociology professor at the Peking University in
1916. But the situation was reversed in the 1940s, when Chinese soci-
ologists became the majority and only a handful of overseas sociologists
14 H.F. Chen

were left. Based upon a survey by Sun Benwen in 1947, there were 131
local Chinese and 12 Americans among the 143 professors of sociology
in China (Sun 1948 [2010]: 317–320).
What was noteworthy here was the American educational back-
ground of returning Chinese sociologists. According to the same sur-
vey in 1947, 71 out of 131 Chinese sociologists (54.2%) were trained
in America, compared to 13 in France, 10 in Japan, 9 in Britain, 4 in
Germany and 1 in Belgium. Among the top 11 universities in China, 40
out of 70 Chinese sociologists (57.1%) were educated in America, with
only 13 professors having no overseas degree. In Yanjing, all teaching
staffs were holders of American degree (Hsiao 1990: 137–138). Finally,
in his survey of the educational background of 15 leading Chinese soci-
ologists of that period, Wong (1979: 34) found that 10 of them received
their doctoral or master degree in America, above all Columbia, whereas
the remaining 5 got their doctoral degrees from the London School of
Economics and Political Science in Britain. All these figures suggested
that Chinese sociology was still highly influenced by America despite the
emergence of an indigenous sociological community (Chen 2009).

Social Survey and the Institutional Basis of Chinese

Sociological Research
With an incipient Chinese academic community, successive attempts
were made to build up the intellectual and institutional foundation of
Chinese sociology from the 1920s onward. A relatively neglected figure
in this regard was Yu Tianxiu (Yu Tinn-Hugh), who obtained his doc-
toral degree in sociology at Clark University in 1920. Upon his return to
China in 1921, Yu founded the Chinese Sociological Society and edited
the Shehuixue Zazhi (Chinese Journal of Sociology), the first specialized
journal of sociology in China. Published by the Shanghai Commercial
Press, its objectives were to introduce sociological knowledge and offer
critical commentaries on family, population and other social problems.
These objectives bore the influence of the May Fourth movement of
1919, which was led by the professors and students in Peking University
with the aim of reconfiguring traditional Chinese culture with “science”
and “democracy” (Cheng and So 1983: 473). Yet there were still few
contributions from professional sociologists to the Chinese Sociological
Society and its journal. In composing a bibliography of recent sociologi-
cal works, the Chinese Journal of Sociology (1922 1(1): 123–131) had to
 2 ACHIEVEMENT WITHOUT COHERENCE: THE RISE … 15

include a large number of popular essays from New Youth, a literary mag-
azine closely related to the newly founded Chinese Communist Party.
The limited development of Chinese sociology at this stage was
rooted in the still scattered character of the indigenous sociological com-
munity and hence the absence of a critical mass. Sociologists of the day,
including Yu himself and the eugenicist cum sociologist Pan Guangdan,
lacked a stable position at the universities in Beijing and Shanghai. As a
rule, they had to take up teaching jobs in other universities and depart-
ments. Neither Beijing nor Shanghai were yet congenial ground for soci-
ology. For while Peking University was dominated by the philological
tradition of late Qing scholars and their modern disciples, the University
of Shanghai was populated by the advocates of socialism and Marxian
sociology (Yeh 1990). From this perspective, the difficulties encoun-
tered by Chinese Journal of Sociology and the Chinese Sociological Society
resulted mainly from the institutional underdevelopment of the univer-
sity system, and an intellectual climate dominated by the critical studies
of Chinese classics and a surging socialist current.
Though Yu Tianxiu was cautious in avoiding the possible confusion
of sociology with socialism, his writings and public speeches at times
adopted the Marxian language of exploitation and imperialism. Yu’s
style was increasingly objectionable to the Nationalist Party as it began
to purge the Communists. It almost led to the official banning of the
Chinese Sociological Society. With limited membership and financial
resources, in 1927 Yu passed the baton of leadership of the Society to
Xu Shilian (Leonard S. Hsu), who was the first Chinese chairman of
the sociology department at Yanjing. The association and its journal
were then renamed the Yanjing Sociological Society and Shehuixuejie
(Sociological World).
Xu Shilian’s predecessor in Yanjing was John Stewart Burgess, who as
we have noted was an American missionary cum social scientist. In 1921,
Burgess and his collaborator Sydney D. Gamble published Peking: A
Social Survey (in English), which was the report of a large-scale survey
of Beijing households and their social life. With a comprehensive cov-
erage on population, government, health, education, commerce, enter-
tainment, prostitution, poverty, prison condition, and Christian activities,
the method and scope of the survey were modeled upon Charles Booth’s
study of the working class in London (Wong 1979: 13). In fact, Burgess
was the first American scholar to conduct a social survey in China,
which had gradually become the hallmark of Chinese sociology and the
16 H.F. Chen

intellectual tradition Xu inherited when he took over the departmental

leadership at Yanjing (Arkush 1981: 27; Trescott 2007: 261). Most of
the early social surveys were designed by professors and carried out by
Chinese students under their supervision. Before the 1921 household
survey, in 1912 Burgess and his students conducted a survey on 302
rickshaw men in Beijing under the commission of a Christian organi-
zation, the Society for Social Improvement in Peking (Wong 1979:
13). The reform impulse was also evident in the 1921 household sur-
vey, which was intended to offer advice for the social welfare program
in Beijing and also to support Christian social workers (Gransow 2003:
503).
From the mid-1920s onward, the task of conducting social surveys had
been shifting from American to Chinese sociologists, who nevertheless put
the same emphasis on direct observation of social life and practical recom-
mendation on family, welfare, population, and other social problems. The
largest and best known survey research of the period was the Ding County
Investigation conducted by Li Jinghan (Franklin C.H. Lee) in 1933. The
survey produced a huge dataset covering 3.78 million respondents and
a whole range of topics pertinent to their rural life, including geogra-
phy, history, local government, communities, industry, commerce and
finance, family, education, tradition, and custom (Li et al. 1987: 623).
The research was supported by the China Association for the Promotion
of Popular Education, a voluntary group under the popular education
and rural construction movements led by Y. C. James Yen (a Chinese
Christian) and Liang Shuming (a neo-Confucian scholar). Li’s study
was widely regarded as the beginning of the social survey movement, as
it was followed by a wave of survey researches by Chinese sociologists,
including Li Jinghan’s A Survey on the Situation of Peking Rickshaw
Pullers in 1925, and Tao Menghe’s An Analysis of the Cost of Living
in Beijing in 1926 (Roulleau-Berger 2016: 20). From 1927 to 1935,
Chinese sociologists completed over 9000 survey projects.
What factors contributed to the spectacular achievement of the social
survey movement? From an institutional point of view, a network of uni-
versities, associations, and foundations played a strategic role here. In the
capacity of the social research director at the China Foundation for the
Promotion of Education and Culture (which was founded with American
war indemnities), Li Jinghan was recruited as a faculty member of the
Yanjing sociology department in 1926. With a broader basis of students
and research volunteers, Li soon became the pivotal figure in the social
 2 ACHIEVEMENT WITHOUT COHERENCE: THE RISE … 17

survey movement. Under the leadership of Li and other Yanjing soci-

ologists, the department had published 68 survey reports in Sociological
World and other channels between 1922 and 1934 (Huang and Xia
2008: 54–64). As a distinctive mode of organizing research activity,
team-based social surveys fit well with the liberal arts mission of Yanjing,
which put a premium on close teacher-student relationships and the
provision of social service to the community. What also favored Yanjing
was its status as a private Christian college, by virtue of which it could
secure a more regular flow of financial resources from the Rockefeller
Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and other American and interna-
tional agencies. Finally, Yanjing’s linkages with local Chinese associations,
including the aforementioned popular education and rural construction
movements, served to enable and facilitate large-scale regional surveys.
Taken as a whole, what made Yanjing the center of survey research was
its position and skill in maintaining bicultural collaborations with foreign
and local groups (Rosenbaum 2015).
Important as it was, Yanjing and its organizational networks did not
exhaust the social survey movement. Non-Christian, non-American
scholars such as Chen Da of Qinghua University also made huge contri-
butions to labor and household surveys. Zhongshan University offered
a rural survey program in 1920 (Trescott 2007: 262). Generally speak-
ing, most sociologists of the day simultaneously served as university
professors and research directors in voluntary associations or research
institutes. John Steward Burgess was a professor in Yanjing and a mem-
ber of the Y.M.C.A., whereas Chen Da of Qinghua and Tao Menghe
of Peking University were in charge of the Institute of Social Survey
in Peking. Thanks to this double status, a collaborative network could
be formed between the various educational institutions. But compared
to private universities, voluntary associations and overseas foundations,
the state only assumed a subordinate role in offering research supports
in this period. While the Nationalist government had been appoint-
ing the board of trustees for the China Foundation for the Promotion
of Education and Culture, in 1926 it was merged with the Institute of
Social and Religious Research in New York to provide regular sponsor-
ship to the Institute of Social Survey in Peking (Wong 1979: 15).
A major intellectual accomplishment of the social survey movement
in China was to go beyond the introduction and translation of Western
works by applying sociological theories and methods to the studies of
Chinese society (Li et al. 1987: 622). But the survey method began to
18 H.F. Chen

invite criticism as it was increasingly adopted. Most were directed against

its empiricist tendency, as the massive collection of facts did not yield a
coherent picture of social life or a consistent solution to social problems.
Without the guidance of a conceptual framework, the social surveys were
often nothing more than fact-finding regarding the history, geography,
population and other spheres of life in a given region. But a closer look
at the historical evidences would serve to qualify these complaints. It was
true that the sociology curriculum at Yanjing was designed to prepare
students for conducting social surveys (Sociological World 1929: 283–
285). Under Xu Shilian’s supervision, however, some of the students
devoted themselves to studies of Chinese social thought and Chinese his-
tory from a sociological perspective. The survey method was not anti-
thetical to sociological theory; the latter indeed underwent significant
development in the subsequent period.

Sociological Theory and the State-Sponsored

Codification of Knowledge
With the end of warlordism and partial unification of China in 1927,
the Nationalist government decided to reform the higher education sys-
tem and provide stronger institutional support for academic disciplines,
including sociology. In the meanwhile, a new batch of overseas Chinese
students was returning from America and Europe. In 1929, a group of
Chinese sociologists teaching in Shanghai and Nanjing, including Sun
Benwen, Wu Jingchao and Wu Zelin, founded the Southeast Sociological
Society and its official journal, Shehuixuekan (Journal of Sociology). This
was welcomed by Xu Shilian and other sociologists in Beijing, who pro-
posed to merge the new society with the Yanjing Sociological Society
into a nationwide association. The proposal was officially passed in
1930, and the new association adopted the name of Chinese Sociological
Society (Li 2012: 72; Dai 1993: 91). Sun Benwen served as the first
chairman and chief editor of its journal. Up to 1949, the Chinese
Sociological Society had held 9 annual conferences, and its membership
was more than doubled from 66 to 160 between 1930 and 1947 (Li
et al. 1987: 619).
At a broader institutional level, the close relationship of Chinese soci-
ologists with private foundations and voluntary associations was being
replaced by a higher level of interaction with the state. A new sociology
department was housed by the National Central University in Nanjing,
 2 ACHIEVEMENT WITHOUT COHERENCE: THE RISE … 19

with Sun Benwen serving as its head. Sun also served in the Ministry
of Education from 1930 to 1932, while Chen Hansheng, a sociolo-
gist at Peking University, was appointed as head of the newly founded
Department of Sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences, Academia
Sinica. While the missionary universities had been enjoying a special
status under the laws of Virginia, in 1930 the Nationalist government
decided to unify the university system and apply nationwide educational
policies to private and public universities alike. In 1938, the Ministry of
Education issued the first standardized curriculum, in which sociology
was designated as an elective course for all students in the faculties of
arts, science, law, and education (Hsiao 1990: 136). A required course
in anthropology and a new subject area of social administration were
included in the national sociology curriculum (Zheng and Li 2003: 104–
105). Before 1929 most of the sociology departments were not affiliated
with any faculty; now it was classified under the faculty of arts or law.
Though the Nationalist Government acknowledged sociology, politi-
cal science, economics and law as social sciences, it rejected the idea of
establishing a faculty of social science (Wong 1979: 20; Yan 2004: 36;
Zhang 2002: 409).
A remarkable impact of the nationalization of higher education was
an increase in student intake in the sociology departments. According to
official statistics, in 1934 there were 483 university students majoring in
sociology, making up 7% of the total in China. Sociology was ranked as
the fifth most popular subject after Chinese literature, Western literature,
history, and education (Wong 1979: 19; Li et al. 1987: 617). In the
1940s, the number of sociology major students reached its peak around
1000–1500 (King and Wang 1978: 38; Zheng and Li 2003: 105). In
the Department of Sociology at Qinghua, a total of 82 sociology major
students were graduated from 1932 to 1947, of whom 74 were male and
only 8 were female. It was noteworthy that 20 graduates worked in the
government and 15 worked in sociology departments and related organi-
zations, testifying to the strong linkages between sociology and the state
(Su 2004: 159–164).
Closely related to the standardization of the sociology curriculum
was the codification of sociological knowledge. In terms of intellectual
impact, the nationalization of the university system offered an incen-
tive for Chinese sociologists to build a more solid and coherent theo-
retical foundation and thereby to enhance the academic status of their
discipline. In 1929, Sun Benwen set out to compile a book series on
20 H.F. Chen

social control, social organization, social change, rural sociology, urban

sociology, research methodology and other sociological topics. It
was published in 15 volumes under the title of An Outline of Sociology
in 1931, of which 3 were written by Sun himself and 12 were writ-
ten by 9 other Chinese sociologists. Underlying this codification effort
was Sun’s vision of “synthetic sociology,” which aimed to encompass a
whole range of themes and approaches in the study of society. In this
regard, Sun published The Principles of Sociology in 1935 and The History
of the Development of Contemporary Sociology in 1947, in which differ-
ent schools of sociology were introduced, discussed and synthesized.
Though not all sociologists would follow Sun’s synthetic approach, they
were more eager to write introductory texts in sociology and its various
subfields. By 1947, around 1000 books had been published on sociology
and other relevant topics, of which 67% were related to social problem
and social policy and 13% were pure sociology and social thought (King
and Wang 1978: 38; Wong 1979: 23).
In addition to textbooks and research monographs, Western socio-
logical classics such as Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method,
Marx’s Capital, William Ogburn’s Social Change, Raymond Firth’s
Human Types and Karl Mannheim’s works in the sociology of knowledge
were translated (Wong 1979: 24). The wide range of these translations
reflected a latent trend of the period. As the sociological community
was expanding from Beijing and Shanghai to Nanjing and elsewhere, it
offered an opportunity for the diversification of sociological knowledge.
Though American sociology remained the dominant model, some sociol-
ogists were experimenting with different schools and national traditions
in Western sociology. An example here was Hu Jianmin, a sociologist in
Shanghai with an academic training in France instead of America. As a
former student of Maurice Halbwachs, Hu published an introductory
series on Durkheimian sociology in the Journal of Sociology (1930 2(1):
139–148; 1930 2(2): 151–174; 1931 2(3): 152–157). Similar efforts
were made by Wu Wenzao, who began his academic career in the early
1930s by introducing the sociological traditions of France, Germany,
Britain, and America (Wu 2010).
On the whole, however, the discussions of American and European
sociology were couched in highly general terms. Methodological issues
such as the differences between statistics and case studies were only
briefly addressed. Outside their professional circle, Sun Benwen, Chen
Xujing and others were able to contribute to the intellectual debate on
 2 ACHIEVEMENT WITHOUT COHERENCE: THE RISE … 21

Western and Chinese culture by drawing upon the new concept of cul-
ture developed by American sociologists and anthropologists in the
1930s. But a remarkable tendency of the more specialized articles in the
Journal of Sociology was an emphasis on theoretical synthesis and a rela-
tive neglect of empirical studies—a reversal of the status quo ante dur-
ing the social survey movement. In this light, one of the major academic
accomplishments of Chinese sociology in the 1930s was the compilation
of book series and textbooks, while the attempt to work out a theoretical
synthesis was still by and large premature.
A possible explanation for the predilection for armchair theorizing lay
in the division of labor between sociology and social administration on
the one hand, and theoretical work and empirical research on the other.
With the progressive march of state-building, the administration of social
affairs was increasingly regarded as the specialized field of social welfare
officers, while the implementation of large-scale research projects was
primarily reserved for the newly founded Academia Sinica. Established
under the instructions of the Nationalist government in 1928, the
Academia Sinica housed the Institute of Social Sciences that in turn
consisted of two subdivisions in ethnology and economics in Nanjing,
and another two subdivisions in sociology and law in Shanghai. While
the Institute of Social Survey headed by Chen Da, Li Jinghan and Tao
Menghe was once the spearhead of survey research, in 1934 it was incor-
porated into the Institute of Social Sciences, Academia Sinica (Gransow
2003: 502–503; Li 2012: 71). Under this new division of academic
labor, sociologists were assigned with the supporting role of teaching
general sociological knowledge to professional social workers and social
researchers. Taking up this supplementary task might secure financial
resources for sociology departments, but it also implied a higher level of
dependency on the state’s educational and social policies.
Although sociology as an academic discipline grew progressively at
the turn of the 1930s, it encountered some serious drawbacks alongside
the marked increase in enrollment and funding (Zheng and Li 2003). A
crisis occurred when the sociology department at the National Central
University was temporarily closed down by the Nationalist government
in 1932 and then again in 1936 (Au-Yeung 2000). Some other univer-
sities also closed their sociology departments in the same period. One
possible factor was that the Nationalist government was skeptical about
the worth of sociology as a separate science, especially as it was focusing
on the building of industrial and military infrastructures. But according
Another random document with
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month or six weeks without food. Nassau, New Providence, the
capital is chiefly supplied from these islands with the guana.
There are several varieties of this reptile in Australia, but that which
is most common is from four to six feet in length, and from about a
foot and a half to two feet across the broadest part of the back, with
a rough dark skin, enlivened by yellow spots. Although perfectly
harmless, as far as the human race are concerned, this huge lizard
is a terrible foe to the smaller quadrupeds—opossums, bandicoots,
kangaroo-rats, &c.,—on which it preys. It is very destructive also
among hen roosts, and often takes up its quarters in the vicinity of a
farm-house for the convenience of supping on the hens and their
eggs.
The guana is much sought for and esteemed by the blacks as an
article of food, and is frequently presented as a great delicacy to the
young ‘gins.’ By the settlers it is not often eaten, owing to the natural
feeling of dislike which is created by its form and habits. Those,
however, who do not entertain these feelings, or are able to
overcome them, find the flesh of the creature really excellent. It is not
unlike that of a rabbit, to which, in flavour, it is fully equal, and eats
best when stewed or curried.
The guana usually lives in trees, and, on the approach of man, it
invariably makes off with great alacrity, scrambling rapidly up the
nearest trunk; but it is easily brought down by a shot.
Captain Keppel tells us, ‘that while out on a shooting excursion at
Port Essington, he observed a native plucking the feathers off a
goose; while so employed his eye caught the tip-end of the tail of an
iguana, an animal of the lizard kind, about four feet long, which was
creeping up the opposite side of a tree; he tossed the goose, without
further preparation, on to the fire, and ascended the tree as easily as
Jack would run up the well-rattled rigging of a man-of-war. He almost
immediately returned with the poor animal struggling in his scientific
grasp. It was the work of a minute to secure it to a stick of about the
same length as itself to prevent its running away, when it was made
to change places with the goose, which, being warm through, was
considered to be sufficiently done. The whole goose he devoured,
making no bones, but spitting out the feathers. Then came the
iguana’s turn, which, although less tender, was not the less relished.
It appeared to require great muscular strength to detach the flesh
from the skin. The operation being finished, he lay down to sleep.
His wife, having sprinkled him with dirt to keep the flies off, was
proceeding to eat the skin of the iguana, when the arrival of some
more geese offered her a more satisfactory repast.’
The iguana is, I believe, the Talagowa of the natives of Ceylon—le
Monitor terrestre d’Egypte of M. Cuvier. The Indian monitor (Monitor
dracæna, Gray) is found in great abundance in all the maritime
provinces of Ceylon. The natives are partial to its flesh. Dr. Kelaart
states that he once tasted some excellent soup made from a tender
guana, which was not unlike hare soup. At Trincomalee they are
hunted down by dogs, and sold in the market for 6d. each. They feed
on the smaller reptiles and insects, and measure, when large, four
feet five inches. Despite its repulsive appearance, the iguana is
eagerly hunted for food by the natives of Africa, Australia, America,
and Asia.
The eggs of the guana are another article deserving the attention of
gourmands. One of these lizards sometimes contains as many as
four-score eggs. These are about the size of a pigeon’s egg, with a
very soft shell, which contains only a very small quantity of the
albumen. The yolk, unlike that of other eggs, does not become hard
and dry when boiled, but is soft and melting as marrow.
It would be a refreshing sight to see Alderman A., or Sheriff B., or
any other civic dignitary who has gone the round of all the dishes
which native and foreign skill have been able to produce, and to
whom a new combination would convey as much delight as a black
tulip or a blue dahlia would to a horticulturist, partaking for the first
time of pâté de foie gras de l’hiccatee, or a dish of the eggs of the
iguana garnished with anchovies. The inhabitants of some of the
Pacific islands esteem the large oval eggs of the lizards as food.
The meat of the Amblyrynchus subcristatus, another lizard, when
cooked, is white, and by those whose stomachs rise above all
prejudices it is relished as very good. Humboldt has remarked, that
in intertropical South America, all lizards which inhabit dry regions
are esteemed delicacies for the table.
There are an almost innumerable variety of lizards, properly so
called, in all parts of the colony of New South Wales, and the whole
of the larger kinds are used for food by the blacks, although but very
rarely eaten by the settlers. Those who have eaten them, state that
their flesh resembles that of a fowl. The dragon lizard, or as it is
sometimes called, the frilled lizard, is the most remarkable, being
provided with a large frill, which it has the power of extending
suddenly, and in a rather startling manner, when attacked or
alarmed; it is usually about a foot and a half or two feet long. The
Jew lizards are dark coloured, with a dewlapped and puffy
appearance about the throat and neck, varying in size, but seldom
exceeding two feet in length. The scaly lizards are fierce looking,
although harmless, reptiles, with a spotted scaly hide, generally
about a foot long, and remarkable for having small round club-
shaped tails. They are easily domesticated, but as their appearance
is far from attractive, they are seldom made pets of. The large spiny-
backed rock lizard resembles a guana, the only material points of
difference being that it has a heavy dewlap beneath its chin, and a
row of spines along the back from the head to the tail. The flat-tailed
lizard, called by the natives the Rock Scorpion, is imagined by them
to be venomous, although in reality it is perfectly harmless; it is
nocturnal in its habits, and possesses to a peculiar extent the
singular power, which is more or less vested in all the lizard family, of
leaving its tail in the hands of any one who attempts to capture it by
laying hold of that appendage, and of making off apparently
scatheless. The sleeping lizard is in body, as well as in its sluggish
habits, exactly like the terrible death adder, from which it is only to be
distinguished by its short feet.
Many of the lizard family are believed by the settlers to be
venomous, but such is not the case; I believe in fact that no four-
footed reptile has yet been discovered which is possessed of venom.
A remarkable power possessed by the guana, and perhaps by
others of the lizard family, is its power of resisting the poison,
ordinarily most destructive to animal life,—prussic acid. A middling
sized guana took a small bottle of prussic acid, and seemed rather to
have been exhilarated by it than otherwise; it was killed, however, by
a dose of arsenic and spirits of wine.
There is a large, ugly, amphibious lizard, about three feet long, met
with in Guiana, known as the Salempenta, or El Matêo, which is
thought (particularly by the Indians) good eating, the flesh being
white and tender. It is, however, much more ugly in appearance than
the guana.
Occasionally large lizards of other kinds, two or three feet in length,
are brought to the Rio market, and they are said to be excellent
eating.
In the reign of Cheops, as an Egyptian gentleman curious in poultry,
and famous even there for his success in producing strange birds,
was walking by the river Nile, he met with an egg, which, from its
appearance, he thought promised results out of the common way;
so, picking it up, he took it home, and gave directions for hatching it.
But some time after, on visiting his poultry yard, he found that all his
pets had disappeared, a few feathers only lying scattered about,
whilst a fearful animal rushed upon him open-mouthed. The fact
was, he had hatched a crocodile.
Mr. Joseph, in his History of Trinidad, tells us, that he has eaten the
eggs of the cayman or alligator, (without knowing what eggs they
were), and found them good. In form and taste they much resemble
the eggs of the domestic hen.
Dr. Buckland, the distinguished geologist, one day gave a dinner,
after dissecting a Mississippi alligator, having asked a good many of
the most distinguished of his classes to dine with him. His house and
his establishment were in good style and taste. His guests
congregated. The dinner-table looked splendid, with glass, china,
and plate, and the meal commenced with excellent soup. ‘How do
you like the soup?’ asked the doctor, after having finished his own
plate, addressing a famous gourmand of the day. ‘Very good,
indeed,’ answered the other; ‘turtle, is it not? I only ask because I do
not find any green fat.’ The doctor shook his head. ‘I think it has
something of a musky taste,’ said another; ‘not unpleasant, but
peculiar.’ ‘All alligators have,’ replied Buckland; ‘the cayman
particularly so. The fellow whom I dissected this morning——’ At this
stage there was a general rout of the whole guests. Every one
turned pale. Half-a-dozen started up from the table; two or three ran
out of the room; and only those who had stout stomachs remained to
the close of an excellent entertainment. ‘See what imagination is!’
said Buckland. ‘If I had told them it was turtle, or tarrapen, or
birdsnest soup, salt-water amphibia or fresh, or the gluten of a fish,
or the maw of a sea bird, they would have pronounced it excellent,
and their digestion been none the worse. Such is prejudice.’ ‘But was
it really an alligator?’ asked a lady. ‘As good a calf’s head as ever
wore a coronet,’ answered Buckland.
The Australian crocodile is more closely allied to the gavial of India
(Gavialis gangeticus), but is now often termed, like the American
species, an alligator. It is large and formidable; one captured by
Captain Stokes, in the Victoria River, and described in his published
journal, was fifteen feet long, and some have been taken still larger
than this. Like all animals of its class, the Australian crocodile is a
much more formidable enemy in the water than on shore; but even in
the latter position, it is by no means to be despised, for it progresses
with tolerable speed; and, although it seldom or never attacks a man
openly when out of its own proper element, still it is believed to have
a strong liking for human flesh, when that delicacy can safely be
obtained. One of these creatures paid a visit to a seaman, who was
asleep in his hammock on shore after a hard day’s labour, and being
unable to get conveniently at the man, it managed to drag off and
carry away the blanket which covered him; the sailor at first charged
his comrade with having made him the subject of a practical joke, but
the foot-prints of the huge reptile, and the discovery of the abstracted
blanket in the water, soon showed him the real character of his
nocturnal visitant.
The flesh of the crocodile is white and delicate, resembling veal. It
was a favourite dish among the Port Essington settlers, and among
the seamen employed in the surveys of the northern coast and rivers
of Australia. It is frequently pursued and killed for food by the
aborigines of that part of the country: the plan which they adopt is to
hunt it into some blind creek, when the reptile, finding itself closely
pressed, and no water near, usually forces its head, and perhaps the
upper part of its body in some sand-hole, fancying that it has, by so
doing, concealed itself from its pursuers. In this position it is
despatched with comparative ease. The crocodile makes a terrible
noise by snapping its jaws, particularly when in pain, or when it is
annoyed by the buzzing about its mouth and eyes of the mosquitoes
or other insects, which are found in myriads among the swamps,
creeks, and shallow waters, where it abides; this snapping noise is
often a startling sound to explorers encamping near waters
frequented by the monster.
The aboriginal tribes far to the southward of the localities in which
the crocodile has its habitation, have an imperfect knowledge of the
animal; stories of its voracity and fierceness have probably been
recounted at the friendly meetings of the tribes, and these stories
have in the same manner passed across the continent, changed and
magnified with each new relation, until on reaching the coast tribes
of the south, the crocodile became a nondescript animal of most
terrible form, frightening the blacks and puzzling the whites under the
name of the Bunyip.
In Dongola, at the present day, the crocodile is caught for the sake of
its flesh, which is regarded as a delicacy. The flesh and fat are eaten
by the Berbers, who consider them excellent. Both parts, however,
have a smell of musk so strong that few strangers can eat
crocodiles’ flesh without violent sickness following.
The Rev. Mr. Haensel, in his Letters on the Nicobar Islands, tells us
that ‘part of the flesh of the crocodile, or cayman, is good and
wholesome when well cooked. It tastes somewhat like pork, for
which I took it, and ate it with much relish, when I first came to
Nancauwery, till, on inquiry, finding it to be the flesh of a beast so
disgusting and horrible in its appearance and habits, I felt a loathing,
which I could never overcome; but it is eaten by both natives and
Europeans.’ The aboriginal natives of Trinidad considered a broiled
slice of alligator as a dainty morsel; and Mr. Joseph, the historian,
records having tasted it, and found it very palatable. Tastes in this,
as in other matters, differ.
Mr. Henry Koster, in his Travels in Brazil, says—‘I have been much
blamed by my friends for not having eaten of the flesh of the
alligator, and, indeed, I felt a little ashamed of my squeamishness
when I was shown by one friend a passage in a French writer, whose
name I forget, in which he speaks favourably of this flesh. However,
if the advocate for experimental eating had seen an alligator cut into
slices, he would, I think, have turned from the sight as quickly as I
did.’ The Indians of South America eat these creatures, but none of
the negroes will touch them.
Dr. Madden, in his Travels in Egypt, appears to have
experimentalized on the saurians as food—
‘I got’ (he says) ‘a small portion of a young crocodile, six feet long,
broiled, to ascertain its taste. The flavour a good deal resembles that
of a lobster, and, though somewhat tough, it might certainly be
considered very excellent food.’
The spectacled cayman (Alligator sclerops) is known under the
name of yacaré, or jacquare, in South America. Azara, the naturalist,
tells us that the eggs of this animal are white, rough, and as large as
those of a goose; they are deposited, to the number of sixty, in the
sand, and covered with dried grass. The Indians of Paraguay, and
other districts, esteem them as food, and also relish the white and
savoury flesh of this alligator, although it is dry and coarse. Cayman
is the Spanish word for alligator, and, according to Walker, alligator is
the name chiefly used for the crocodile in America.
Mr. Wallace thus describes an alligator hunt, as pursued on the lakes
in Mexiana, an island lying off the mouth of the Amazon:—‘A number
of negroes went into the water with long poles, driving the animals to
the side, where others awaited them with harpoons and lassos.
Sometimes, the lasso was at once thrown over their heads, or, if first
harpooned, a lasso was then secured to them, either over the head
or the tail, and they were easily dragged to the shore by the united
force of ten or twelve men. Another lasso was fixed, if necessary, so
as to fasten them at both ends; and, on being pulled out of the water,
a negro cautiously approached with an axe, and cut a deep gash
across the root of the tail, rendering this formidable weapon useless;
another blow across the neck disabled the head; and the animal was
then left, and pursuit of another commenced, which was speedily
reduced to the same condition.
‘Sometimes the cord would break, or the harpoon get loose, and the
negroes had often to wade into the water among the ferocious
animals in a very hazardous manner. They were from ten to eighteen
feet long, sometimes even twenty, with enormous mis-shapen heads
and fearful rows of long, sharp teeth. When a number were out on
the land, dead or dying, they were cut open, and the fat, which
accumulates in considerable quantities about the intestines, was
taken out, and made up into packets in the skins of the smaller ones,
taken off for the purpose. After killing twelve or fifteen, the overseer
and his party went off to another lake at a short distance, where the
alligators were more plentiful, and by night had killed nearly fifty. The
next day they killed twenty or thirty more, and got out the fat from the
others. In some of these lakes 100 alligators have been killed in a
few days; in the Amazon or Para rivers it would be difficult to kill as
many in a year. The fat is boiled down into oil and burned in lamps. It
has rather a disagreeable smell, but not worse than train-oil.’
The flesh of the land alligator, as it is termed by the Malays (the
Hydrosaurus salvator), which occasionally attains the length of five
or six feet, makes, it is said, good eating, and is much esteemed by
the natives for its supposed restorative and invigorating properties.
At Manila, these creatures are regularly sold in the markets, and
fetch a good price; the dried skin is readily bought by the Chinese,
who use it in some of their indescribable messes of gelatinous soup.
Another species eaten is the Hydrosaurus giganteus. Like that of the
Iguanæ of the New World, the flesh of these saurians is delicate
eating, and has been compared to that of a very young sucking pig.
The eggs of all the different kinds of alligators, and there are three or
four distinct species abounding in the Amazon and its tributary
streams, are eaten by the natives, though they have a very strong
musky odour. The largest species of alligator (Jacare nigra), reaches
a length of 15 or rarely 20 feet.
Mr. Wallace, in his Travels, records, that on one occasion, the
Indians on the Rio Negro supped off a young alligator they had
caught in a brook near, ‘but the musty odour was so strong that I
could not stomach it, and after getting down a bit of the tail, finished
my supper with mingau, or gruel of mandioc.’
Alligators are killed in great numbers in parts of the river Amazon, for
their fat, which is made into oil.
Hernandez states, that the flesh of the Axolotl, an aquatic reptile, is
very agreeable and wholesome. It is the Siren pisciformis of Shaw;
the Menobranchus pisciformis, Harl. It is commonly sold in the
markets of Mexico. When dressed after the manner of stewed eels,
and served up, with a stimulating sauce, it is esteemed a great
luxury. The flesh of the sauve-garde or common Teguixin of Brazil
(Teguixin monitor of Gray, Teius Teguixin) is eaten, and is said to be
excellent.
The flesh of the common ada of Mr. Gray is accounted excellent by
the natives of Guiana, who compare it to a fowl; its eggs are also in
great request. It is the Thorictes dracæna, Bibron; La grande
dragonne, Cuvier, and attains the length of four to six feet.
Some species of lizards are used as food in Burmah. One of these
especially, called pada, is stated not to be inferior to a fowl,—this is
probably the iguana. Nearly every species of serpent is eaten there,
after the head has been cut off. All have a fishy taste. Some few
kinds, however, although the teeth are carefully removed, cannot be
used, as the flesh appears to be poisonous.
The flesh of snakes is eaten by many in Dominica, particularly by the
French, some of whom are very fond of it; but it is reckoned
unwholesome, and to occasion the leprosy.
A snake called, by the natives of Western Australia wango, is
particularly liked by them as food.
There is a very venomous yellow-bellied snake, from five to six feet
long, called locally dubyt, which is much dreaded; but that is also
eaten by them.
The formidable lance-headed viper, of the Leeward Islands
(Trigonocephalus lanceolatus), feeds chiefly on birds, lizards, and
rats. After swallowing their prey, these snakes exhale a disgusting
odour; this does not prevent the negroes from eating their flesh,
which they find, it is said, free from any unpleasant flavour.
Mr. Buckland, in his interesting volume, Curiosities of Natural
History, says, he once had the opportunity of tasting a boa-
constrictor, that had been killed by an accident, and came into his
possession.
‘I tried the experiment,’ he observes, ‘and cooked a bit of him; it
tasted very like veal, the flesh being exceedingly white and firm. If I
had had nothing else, and could have forgotten what I was eating, I
could easily have made a dinner of it.’
The flesh of serpents was held in high repute by the ancients,
medicinally; and, when properly prepared, seems to have made a
very agreeable article of diet, corresponding with the turtle soup of
the present day. Even now, in the French tariff, vipers are subject to
a duty of 4s. the cwt.
In Guatemala, there is a popular belief, that lizards eaten alive cure
the cancer. The Indians are said to have made this important
discovery; and in 1780, the subject was investigated by European
physicians. I do not find the remedy in the modern pharmacopœias,
nevertheless, the inhabitants of Amatitlan, the town where the
discovery was first made, still adhere to their belief in its efficacy. The
man who first eat a live oyster or clam, was certainly a venturous
fellow, but the eccentric individual who allowed a live lizard to run
down his throat, was infinitely more so. There is no accounting for
taste.
Probably some of our learned physiologists and medical men may
be able to explain the therapeutic effects.
Some of the tribes of Southern Guinea, eat the boa-constrictor, or
python, and consider it delicate food. The more informed among
them, however, regard the practice as peculiarly heathenish. In
Ceylon, the flesh of the anaconda, which is said to devour travellers,
is much esteemed as food by some of the natives.
Who shall determine what is good eating? When we have gone over
so many delicacies, we must not be surprised at men’s eating
rattlesnakes, and pronouncing them capital food. An English writer,
who has recently published a work entitled A Ride over the Rocky
Mountains to Oregon and California, in describing the journey across
the great desert, says:—
‘12th July.—Shot two prairie dogs. Jem killed a hare and rattlesnake.
They were all capital eating, not excepting the snake, which the
parson cooked, and thought it as good as eel!’
The Australian aborigines, and some of the Kafir tribes, commonly
eat snakes roasted in the fire—and stewed snakes may, for aught I
know, be as good as stewed eels.
The Italians regale themselves with a jelly made of stewed vipers.
The Bushman of Africa catches serpents, not only as an article of
food, but to procure poison for his arrows.
Various reliable accounts before me prove that rattlesnakes are not
unfit for food, and may be placed among the multifarious articles
regarded by man as delicacies of the table. The negroes eat the
flesh of the rattlesnake, as well as that of other serpents. When the
skin and intestines are removed, no bad odour remains. A
correspondent of the Penny Magazine thus describes his experience
of fried rattlesnakes, at a tavern in Kaskaskia, a small town on the
Mississippi. He finds there a party of four or five travellers, who had
been on an exploring expedition:—
‘After a brief interview, they politely invited me to partake of the
supper they had already bespoken, informing me, at the same time,
that they considered themselves peculiarly fortunate in having
procured an excellent dish,—in fact, a great delicacy—in a place
where they expected to meet with but indifferent fare. What this great
delicacy was, they did not attempt to explain; and, having without
hesitation accepted of their invitation, I felt no inclination to make any
farther inquiries.
‘When the hour of supper arrived, the principal dish—and, indeed,
almost the only one upon the table—appeared to me to be a dish of
good-sized eels fried. I being the guest of my new acquaintances,
had the honor of being the first served with a plate of what the
person who presided called ‘Musical Jack.’ ‘Musical Jack,’ thought I,
is some species of eel peculiar to the Mississippi and its tributary
waters; and taking it for granted that it was all right, I forthwith began
to ply my knife and fork. ‘Stop,’ said the individual that occupied the
bottom of the table, before I had swallowed two mouthfuls. ‘You, sir,
have no idea, I presume, what you are eating; and since you are our
guest for the time being, I think it but right that you should have no
cause hereafter to think yourself imposed upon. The dish before you,
which we familiarly call ‘Musical Jack,’ is composed of rattlesnakes,
which the hunter who accompanies us in our tour of exploration was
so fortunate to procure for us this afternoon. It is far from the first
time that we have fared thus; and, although our own hunter skinned,
decapitated, and dressed the creatures, it was only through dint of
coaxing that our hostess was prevailed upon to lend her frying-pan
for so vile a purpose.’
‘Although curiosity had on many occasions prompted me to taste
strange and unsavoury dishes, I must confess that never before did I
feel such a loathing and disgust as I did towards the victuals before
me. I was scarcely able to listen to the conclusion of this short
address, ere I found it prudent to hurry out of the room; nor did I
return till supper was over, and ‘Musical Jack’ had either been
devoured or dismissed their presence.
‘As far as I recollect the circumstance, there was nothing peculiar or
disagreeable in the flavour of the small quantity I ate; and when the
subject was calmly discussed on the following day, one of the party
assured me he was really partial to the meat of the rattlesnake,
although some of the other members of his party had not been fully
able to conquer their early-conceived antipathies towards this snake;
but that during their long journey they had been occasionally
prevailed upon to make trial of a small quantity of the flesh, and were
willing to own that had they, been ignorant of its nature, they should
have pronounced it of a quality passably good.
‘Ever afterwards in my visits to Kaskaskia, I narrowly examined
every dish of a dubious character that was placed before me, in
order to satisfy myself that it was not ‘Musical Jack.’’
Dr. Lang, in one of his works, gives us an account of snake cooking
in Australia:—
‘One of the black fellows took the snake, and placing it on the branch
of a tree, and striking it on the back of the head repeatedly with a
piece of wood, threw it into the fire. The animal was not quite dead,
for it wriggled for a minute or two in the fire, and then became very
stiff and swollen, apparently from the expansion of the gases
imprisoned in its body. The black fellow then drew it out of the fire,
and with a knife cut through the skin longitudinally on both sides of
the animal, from the head to the tail. He then coiled it up as a sailor
does a rope, and laid it again upon the fire, turning it over again and
again with a stick till he thought it sufficiently done on all sides, and
superintending the process of cooking with all the interest
imaginable. When he thought it sufficiently roasted, he thrust a stick
into the coil, and laid it on the grass to cool, and when cool enough
to admit of handling, he took it up again, wrung off its head and tail,
which he threw away, and then broke the rest of the animal by the
joints of the vertebræ into several pieces, one of which he threw to
the other black fellow, and another he began eating himself with
much apparent relish. Neither Mr. Wade nor myself having ever
previously had the good fortune to witness the dressing of a snake
for dinner by the black natives, we were much interested with the
whole operation; and as the steam from the roasting snake was by
no means unsavoury, and the flesh delicately white, we were each
induced to try a bit of it. It was not unpalatable by any means,
although rather fibrous and stringy like ling-fish. Mr. Wade observed,
that it reminded him of the taste of eels; but as there was a strong
prejudice against the use of eels as an article of food in the west of
Scotland, in my boyhood, I had never tasted an eel, and was
therefore unable to testify to the correctness of this observation.
There was doubtless an equally strong prejudice to get over in the
case of a snake, and for an hour or two after I had partaken of it, my
stomach was ever and anon on the point of insurrection at the very
idea of the thing; but, thinking it unmanly to yield to such a feeling, I
managed to keep it down.’
In a paper which I published in the Journal of the Society of Arts, in
October 1856, (vol. 4, p. 872,) I entered very fully into a description
of the various snakes which are met with in different countries,
poisonous or harmless, and to that paper I would refer those who
wish to obtain descriptive details—scientific or general—not bearing
on the subject of food, at present under our consideration.
The consumption of frogs is not, as is very often supposed, confined
to the French. It is now also indulged in, to a considerable extent, by
Americans; and frogs appear to command a high price in the New
York market. An enthusiastic writer tries to convince us, that the only
objection to frogs as an article of diet is a mere prejudice on the part
of those who have never eaten them. ‘In what respect are they
worse than eels? The frog who swallows young birds and ducklings
is surely as clean a feeder as the snake-like creature that dines on
dead dogs, and makes the celebrity of the ait at Twickenham. Or is a
frog less savoury than a rat? And yet what a price was paid for rats
at the siege of Kars! If the garrison could only have been supplied
with lots of frogs—literal or metaphorical—the Russians would never
have taken the place. Again, does a snail—the large escargot, which
people are so fond of in Paris—appear more tempting than a frog?
Or that animal picked out of its shell with a pin, and called, in vulgar
parlance, a winkle. ‘Away, then,’ as indignant orators say, ‘away,
then, with this cant of false delicacy and squeamishness, and the
very first opportunity you have, O lector fastidioso! order A Dish of
Frogs. They are quite as good as whitebait, when assisted by a flask
of Rhenish.’
The Athenæum, also, recently came out in favour of frogs. ‘There is
no reason,’ it remarks, ‘why we should eschew frogs and relish turtle;
still less is there for our eating one or two of the numerous edible
funguses, which our island produces, and condemning all the rest.’
The green or edible frog (Rana esculenta) is a native of Europe,
some parts of Asia, and also of Northern Africa. It is in high request
on the Continent for its flesh, the meat of the hind quarters, which is
alone used, being delicate and well tasted. In Vienna, where the
consumption of these frogs is very considerable, they are preserved
alive, and fattened in froggeries (grenouillières) constructed for the
express purpose.
In America, the flesh of the huge bull-frog (R. pipiens, Harl.; R.
mugiens, Catesby,) is tender, white, and affords excellent eating.
Some bull-frogs weigh as much as half-a-pound, but the hind legs
are the only parts used as food. They make excellent bait for the
larger cat-fish.
In the Antilles, another huge bull-frog is reared in a state of
domestication for the table. It is the Rana ocellata, Linn; R. gigas of
Spix; Cystignathus ocellatus, Wagler.
Toads seem also to be eaten by the French, though unwittingly.
Professor Dumeril used to relate, in his lectures at the Jardin des
Plantes, that the frogs brought to the markets in Paris are caught in
the stagnant waters round Montmorenci, in the Bois de Vincennes,
Bois de Boulogne, &c. The people employed in this traffic separate
the hind quarters and legs of the frogs from the body, denude them
of their skin, arrange them on skewers, as larks are done in this
country, and then bring them in that state to market. In seeking for
frogs, these dealers often meet with toads, which they do not reject,
but prepare them in the same way as they would frogs; and, as it is
impossible to determine whether the hind quarters of these
creatures, after the skin is stripped off, belong to frogs or toads, it
continually happen that great numbers of the supposed frogs sold in
Paris for food are actually toads.[18]
This account of the mode of bringing the frogs to market, in Paris,
does not tally with that given by my friend, Mr. F. T. Buckland, in his
Curiosities of Natural History; he says:—
‘In France, frogs are considered a luxury, as any bon vivant ordering
a dish of them at the Trois Frères, at Paris, may, by the long price,
speedily ascertain. Not wishing to try such an expensive experiment
in gastronomy, I went to the large market in the Faubourg St.
Germain, and enquired for frogs. I was referred to a stately-looking
dame at a fish-stall, who produced a box nearly full of them, huddling
and crawling about, and occasionally croaking as though aware of
the fate to which they were destined. The price fixed was two a
penny, and having ordered a dish to be prepared, the Dame de la
Halle dived her hand in among them, and having secured her victim
by the hind legs, she severed him in twain with a sharp knife; the
legs, minus skin, still struggling, were placed on a dish; and the
head, with the fore-legs affixed, retained life and motion, and
performed such motions that the operation became painful to look at.
These legs were afterwards cooked at the restaurateur’s, being
served up fried in bread crumbs, as larks are in England; and most
excellent eating they were, tasting more like the delicate flesh of the
rabbit than anything else I can think of. I afterwards tried a dish of
the common English frog, but his flesh is not so white nor so tender
as that of his French brother.’
The Chinese seem also to appreciate frogs, for Mr. Fortune, in
describing a Chinese market, says—
‘Frogs seemed much in demand. They are brought to market in tubs
and baskets, and the vender employs himself in skinning them as he
sits making sales. He is extremely expert at this part of his business.
He takes up the frog in his left hand, and with a knife, which he holds
in his right, chops off the fore part of its head. The skin is then drawn
back over the body and down to the feet, which are chopped off and
thrown away. The poor frog, still alive, but headless, skinless, and
feetless, is then thrown into another tub, and the operation is
repeated on the rest in the same way. Every now and then the artist
lays down his knife, and takes up his scales to weigh these animals
for his customers, and make his sales. Everything in this civilised
country, whether it be gold or silver, geese or frogs, is sold by
weight.’
According to Seba and Madame Merian, the negroes eat the flesh of
the Surinam toad (Pipa Surinamensis).
Frogs or toads of an enormous size (Crapaux) are very numerous in
Dominica, and much esteemed as an article of food; the flesh, when
fricasseed, being preferred by the English, as well as French, to
chickens; and, when made into soup, recommended for the sick,
especially in consumptive cases.
Wallace, in his Travels on the Amazon, tells us, ‘his Indians went
several times early in the morning to the gapo to catch frogs, which
they obtained in great numbers, stringing them on a sipo, and boiling
them entire, entrails and all, and devoured them with much gusto.
The frogs are mottled of various colours, have dilated toes, and are
called jui.’
The eating of frogs seems to be indulged in in the Philippines, for a
traveller tells us that—
‘After the rains there may generally be procured, by those who like
them, frogs, which are taken from the ditch round the walls in great
numbers, and are then fat and in good condition for eating, making a
very favourite curry of some of the Europeans, their flesh being very
tender.’[19]
 FISH.
More than two-thirds of our globe being covered by the waters of the
ocean, and of the remaining third a great part being washed by
extensive rivers, or occupied by lakes, ponds, or marshes, these
watery realms, teeming with life, furnish man with a great variety of
food. Some of these have already passed under consideration in the
reptilia, and others in the great class mammalia, as seals, morses,
and manatees, which can remain at no great distance from the sea,
together with whales, which never leave it, though constantly
obliged, by the nature of their respiration, to seek its surface.
Mollusca, crustacea, annelides, and zoophytes are almost peculiar
to this element, having but few scattered representatives on earth;
but, amidst all its varied inhabitants, there are none more exclusively
confined to its realms, none that rule them with such absolute sway,
none more remarkable for number, variety of form, beauty of colour,
and, above all, for the infinite advantages which they yield to man,
than the great class of fishes. In fact, their evident superiority has
caused their name to pass as a general appellation to all the
inhabitants of the deep. Whales are called fish, crabs are called
shell-fish, and the same term is used to denote oysters; though the
first are mammalia, the second articulata, and the third mollusca.
Milton has well described the abundance of fish—

——‘Each creek and bay,

With fry innumerable swarm and shoals
Of fish, that with their fins and shining scales,
Glide under the green waves; * * *
* * * part single, or with mate
Graze the sea-weed, their pasture, and through groves
Of coral stray; or sporting, with quick glance,
Show to the sun their way’d coats dropp’d with gold.’
The modes of preserving fish are various; they are salted and dried,
smoked and potted, baked or marinated, preserved in oil, and
pounded in a dry mass.
Several savage nations possess the art of preparing fish in a great
variety of ways, even as a kind of flour, bread, &c.
Dr. Davy, commenting upon the remarkable facts respecting the
exemption of fish-eating persons from certain diseases, suggests
that there is undoubtedly something in the composition of fish which
is not common to other articles of food, whether vegetable or animal.
He believes this consists of iodine. He says, that in all instances in
which he sought for this substance in sea fish he has found it; and
also traces of it in migratory fish, but not in fresh-water fish.
The trials he made were limited to red gurnard, mackerel, haddock,
common cod, whiting, sole, ling, herring, pilchard, salmon, sea-trout,
smelt, and trout.
The experiment was as follows.—He dried and charred, lixiviated,
reduced to ashes, and again washed from a quarter of a pound to a
pound of fish.
A good deal of limy matter was afforded from the washings of the
charcoal of the sea fish.
The saline matter was principally common salt, had a pretty strong
alkaline reaction, and by the blue hue produced by starch and aqua
regia, afforded a clear proof of the presence of iodine. Only a slight
trace was detected in the fresh-water salmon, sea-trout, and smelt.
In the spent salmon descending to the sea, only just a perceptible
trace was observable, and no trace in either parr or trout.
Dr. Davy states further, that he has detected it in an unmistakable
manner in the common shrimp; also in the cockle, mussel, oyster,
crab, &c.; nor is this remarkable, considering that it enters into the
greater part of the food of fishes.
He observes, also, that cod liver oil is well established as an
alterative or cure of pulmonary consumption, and as this oil contains
iodine, the inference is, that sea fish, generally, may be alike
beneficial. The practical application of this inquiry is obvious. A
suggestion is also made as to the efficacy of drying fish, even
without salt, the drying being complete to the exclusion of even
hydroscopic water, for the use of the explorer and traveller.
The inference as to the salutary effects of fish depending on the
presence of iodine, in the prevention of tubercular disease, might be
extended to goitre, which it is known has already yielded to iodine.
This formidable complaint appears to be completely unknown to the
inhabitants of sea-ports and sea-coasts. Respecting another and
concluding question, viz., the different parts of fish, it is to be
remarked that, so far as experiments have gone, the effects will not
be the same from all parts of the fish, because the inorganic
elements are not the same. The examples chosen are the liver,
muscle, roe, or melt. In the ash of the liver and muscle of sea-fish,
Dr. Davy always found a large proportion of saline matter, common
salt, abounding, with a minute portion of iodine, rather more in the
liver than the muscle, and free alkali, or alkali in a state to occasion
an alkaline reaction, as denoted by test-paper; whilst in the roe or
melt there has been detected very little saline matter, no trace of
iodine, nor of free alkali; on the contrary, a free acid, viz.,
phosphorus, analogous to what occurs in the yolk of an egg, and in
consequence of which it is very difficult to digest either the roe or
melt of a fish, or the yolk of an egg. The same conclusion on the
same ground is applicable to fresh-water fish, viz., the absence of
iodine.
A very common North American dish is chowder, which is thus
prepared:—
Fry brown several slices of pork; cut each fish into five or six pieces;
flour, and place a layer of them in your pork fat; sprinkle on a little
pepper and salt; add cloves, mace, and sliced onions; if liked, lay on
bits of the fried pork, and crackers soaked in cold water. Repeat this
till you put in all the fish; turn on water just sufficient to cover them,
and put on a heated bake pan lid. After stewing about 20 minutes,
take up the fish, and mix two teaspoonfuls of flour with a little water,
and stir it into the gravy, adding a little pepper and butter. A tumbler
of wine, catsup, and spices will improve it. Cod and bass make the