April, 1892. 1 89 



or even exterminate some species, until under further favouring cir- 

 cumstances they are recruited by stragglers from the neighbouring 

 hills or plains, as the case may be. One such event occurred this year 

 with the arrival of the locusts. The mature locusts appeared in the 

 cold weather, but did little harm to the park and the garden of the 

 mess bungalow, almost the only two places where butterflies are to be 

 found. A word or two regarding these. The former comprises some 

 fifty acres, laid out wath two or three artificial ponds. No garden 

 plants are grown, and the principal trees are chiar {Pinus longifolia), 

 acacias {mimosa and arahica), and " sessum," which is by far the most 

 abundant. Grass is grown wherever practicable, and is used for the 

 cavalry and artillery horses in the station. In the mess garden are 

 grown many varieties of English flowers, which prove very attractive 

 to butterflies, and more especially the Sphinx haw^k moths, convolvuli, 

 livornica and celerio. At the commencement of May the young 

 locusts arrived in such swarms that they practically ruined the garden, 

 and eat up every green thing in the park. It is difficult to give an 

 idea of their masses ; they advanced across the country like a huge 

 army, devastating everything as they went, and fouling wells and 

 water courses by falling into them in thousands. One is so accus- 

 tomed from one's youth to regard the locust as a flying insect only, 

 and to see it constantly depicted as such, that one is more or less 

 unacquainted with it in its earlier stages. At first it is entirely black, 

 and then changes to a fine green colour, ornamented with black and 

 yellow. It is wingless, but crawls about everywhere, trees, walls, and 

 the insides of tents are covered with their slowly moving columns, 

 and seemingly they eat everything except metal. It is in this stage 

 that they encumber the railway lines to such an extent as to stop the 

 trains. I experienced this once myself when travelling from Lahore 

 to Pindi. We were proceeding up a slight incline, and gradually got 

 slower and slower until w^e stopped, and the rails had to be swept 

 clear. Apparently the body of the locust contains a substance of an 

 oily nature, and the crushed bodies on the hot rails prevented the 

 wheels from catching. The smell from their crushed and half-cooked 

 oily bodies (the weather was extremely hot) was indescribably nasty. 



In the middle of May, I went to Kalabagh, in the Murree Hills 

 and twenty miles north of Murree. The road for the w^hole distance 

 was infested by brown locusts in the flying state, and in places the 

 destruction they caused was enormous. Hundreds of acres of trees, 

 which should have been green with their summer foliage, assumed an 

 autumnal brown from the clinging insects, and in a few hours, or by 



