166 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



Two days afterwards, the weather being moderate, the brig sailed through 

 swarms of them floating dead upon the waters."^ 



With respect to the course which the locusts pursue, Hasselquist has 

 observed that they migrate in a direct meridian line from south to north, 

 passing from the deserts of Arabia, which is the great cradle of them, to 

 Palestine, Syria, Carmania, Natolia, Bithynia, Constantinople, Poland, 

 &c. — they never turn either to the east or to the west.^ But this must be 

 a mistaken notion ; for those which Major Moor saw at Poonah, of which 

 I have given an account above^, must have come due east. Mr. Jackson 

 also noticed their course north of the line to be towards the south'* ; and 

 Sparrman tells us that those south of the line migrate in the same 

 direction.^ 



I fear that Hasselquist's question, — Could they not by fright, or some 

 other method, be turned from their dreadful course, to steer for some river, 

 and by that means be obliged to destroy themselves?^ — must be answered 

 in the negative. All such experiments, it is to be apprehended, would be 

 about as effectual as sending an army, with all the apparatus of war, to 

 take the field against them, as this author says is done in Syria, where the 

 Bashaw of Tripoli once raised a force of 4000 soldiers to fight the 

 locusts, and very summarily ordered all to be hanged who, thinking it 

 beneath them to waste their valor upon such pigmy foes, refused to join 

 the party.' 



I am, &c. 



' Ann. Nat. Hist. vi. 527. The authenticity of the above accounts is fully proved by a 

 fact mentioned by Mr. Darwin, — that a large grasshopper (Acrydium) flew on board the 

 Beagle when she was to windward of the Cape de Verd Islands, and when the nearest 

 point of land, not directly opposed to the tradewind, was Cape Blanco, on the west of 

 Africa, 370 miles distant. (Journal in Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, p. 186.) 



* Voyage to the Levant, p. 446, 447. ^ See p. 162. 



< Travels, 54. * Travels, i. 3G6. « Travels, 455. ' Travels, 447. 



