330 THE UNIVERSE. 



times seen to devour in a very short time all the foliage of 

 a vast extent of forest. I was enabled to observe one of 

 these devastations in a wood in the department of the Seine- 

 Inferieure. All the trees had been utterly despoiled of their 

 verdure ; not a leaf, strictly speaking, hung on one of them ; 

 and in this forest, which we traversed in the middle of 

 summer, we might have thought ourselves in midwinter, 

 had not the burning sun, striking through the bare branches, 

 scorched us with his rays. 



The May-bugs often quit the forests in order to attack the 

 fields. In 1574 they swarmed so on the coasts of England 

 that when they fell into the Severn they clogged the wheels 

 of the mills. In a chronicle of 1688 we read that these in- 

 sects multiplied so fearfully that year in Ireland that in the 

 county of Galway the air was obscured, and they swarmed 

 so in the fields that it was difficult to make a path through 

 them. 



But its larvae, which the French peasants call mans, cause 

 far more destruction among the forests and crops. They 

 live beneath the surface of the soil, where it is difficult to 

 track them, and gnaw the roots of the plants, so that they 

 sometimes totally devastate rich fields. In those seasons 

 which favor their multiplication they become a fearful pest 

 to the agriculturist. Normandy, which is often ravaged by 

 their devouring legions, has at different times begged of 

 the government to take some measures that would arrest 

 this invasion. In 1866 these larvae were so abundant in 

 several cantons in the department of the Seine-Inferieure 

 that they absolutely annihilated whole fields of beet-root 

 and colza. In one canton alone there was collected in a 



