248 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1891. 



numbers, and the vigorous measures taken by the District Officers in destroying the 

 young insects wherever they emerged seem to have been attended with such success 

 that no very serious damage occurred. It is only therefore in some of the States 

 of Western Raj put an a, where the insects were very numerous and the people too 

 sparsely scattered and apathetic to cope with the evil, that any serious injury has 

 been sustained, and even of this no definite estimates have been received, and the 

 fact can only be inferred from such expressions as " great damage," " immense 

 harm," and " considerable damage," which occur in the reports received from the 

 Jodhpur, Jeysulmere, Sirohi, and Bikanir States. Slight damage to the crops 

 has been reported from Sind, the Punjab, North- West Provinces, from several of 

 the States of Eastern Rajputana, and from the Central Provinces, Bengal, Bombay, 

 and Madras, but in almost all cases it seems to ha>'e been confined to compara- 

 tively small areas, and uo general estimates have been received of its total amount. 

 And the chief point to notice with regard to it is that the amount of damage done 

 by a swarm generally becomes less and less as it wanders away from its home in 

 the North-West into the (to it) inhospitable regions of the more fertile and thickly 

 populated provinces. The flights which visited the North-West Provinces in the 

 cold weather of 1889 were generally reported by the District Officers as doing 

 but slight or trifling damage, the following being the worst cases : — In theFateh- 

 pur district the damage was estimated at two annas iu the rupee; in the 

 Hamirpur and Bahraich districts at one anna in the rupee ; in Jaunpur at six 

 pies in the rupee ; in Jhansi as considerable in ten or twelve villages; in the Tarai 

 as considerable in one pargana. The total damage done in the Ajmere-Merwara 

 district in 1889-90 was estimated at about Rs. 20,000, and this was thought by 

 the Collector to be slightly exaggerated. In the case of the flight which visited 

 the Anakapalle taluk in the Vizagapatam district, Madras, on 18th November, 

 1889, the damage done to the rarji crop was estimated at about Rs. 150. 



The chief crops reported as injured by the locusts have been cotton, indigo, til, 

 bajra,juwar, wheat, gram, and grass, but the insects are evidently not very parti- 

 cular in their tastes, and will probably eat almost any field or garden crop they 

 come across. They also attack the foliage of various trees with great avidity, 

 sirris, pepul, chir, and various Acacias having been noticed as particularly 

 suffering. One writer even describes how the hard red bark of babool trees was 

 gnawed so as to lay the wood bare and white from root to top, and almost the only 

 plant to which they seem to show an aversion is tea — a fact which was noticed 

 both some years ago when a flight visited Dehra Dun in the North-West Provinces, 

 and again in November, 1890, in Dhubri, Assam, where a stray flight did some 

 damage to garden crops, but scarcely touched the tea boshes. 



There seems to be no doubt but that where the population is fairly dense and 



combined efforts are made by the cultivators to 



JESSE iocu^ pted destr °y fche insects > m » ch ™^y to the cr °p s can be 



prevented without any undue expenditure of labour. 

 The best time to attack the insects is shortlv after they hatch out from the 



