April 21—Out in my garden this morning, wondering how anything could be more beautiful than the green earth in Springtime... sun shining, flowers blooming, and the earlier trees now fully leafed.... Poplar, Willow and Ash (Pterocarya) all flickering shades of green as the gentle breeze flutters and turns the leaves....while in the vegetable perch the gardener, armed with a four-pronged hoe, turns up great clods of brown earth which, at a distance, look "good enough to eat." And just at this point in my soliloquy I thought of the film "The Good Earth," and the famine scene where the neighbours enter Wang's house in search of food, to find O-Lan boiling earth because, she says, "it fills the stomach and relieves the pains of hunger." This made me think of a recent lecture given by an expert on nutrition, in which he mentions "earth-eating," so I hurried indoors to take some notes for my diary. And this is the result in summary form. The scientific name for earth-eating is geophagia and earth-eaters are found in all countries over the world: a tribe on the Rio Negro "exist for a part of the season on a fat unctuous clay:" in Northern Europe is a kind of earth known as "bread meal:" certain African natives eat earth but prefer the earth from ant-hills (and it is supposed that the remains of the ants furnish nourishment): samples of earth, so used, have been received from Shansi and Shantung: it is customary in Shantung to serve a special kind of earth (something like powdered soapstone) much as
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.