316 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY [Vol. 2 



are enervating and others dangerous to his life. From the earliest 

 historic times he has suffered from both forms of injury, but nat- 

 urally the early records refer most frequently to famine conditions 

 resulting from crop destruction, the causes of which M'ere obvious to 

 all observers, while the office of insects as carriers of disease was, in 

 early days, very imperfectly understood and, for the most part, not 

 suspected at all. Among the plagues visited upon Egypt in the days 

 of Moses was one of lice "in man and in beast," and swarms of flies 

 were promised to Pharaoh in these words : "I will send swarms of 

 flies upon thee and upon thy servants and upon thy people and into 

 thy houses; and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms 

 of flies and also the ground whereon they are." The plague of 

 locusts is said to have "covered the face of the whole earth so that 

 the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land and 

 all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left; and there remained 

 not any green thing in the trees or in the herbs of the field through all 

 the land of Egypt." 



To merely enumerate the locust invasions paralleling the Egyp- 

 tian outbreak that have since been recorded in vaHous parts of the 

 world would require many sheets of manuscript, but let us pause long 

 enough to glean a few quotations. Pliny, the Roman naturalist, writ- 

 ing from 50 to 79 A. D., says: "Their numbers are so vast that 

 they c^uite darken the sun. Those from Africa are the ones which 

 chiefly devastate Italy ; and more than once the Roman j^eople have 

 been obliged to have recourse to the Sibylline books to learn what 

 remedies to employ under their apprehensions of impending danger." 

 Beauplan, writing of a swarm that visited the Ukraine in 1645 and 

 1646, says: "These creatures do not come in legions but in whole 

 clouds, five or six leagues in length and two or three in breadth, and 

 generally come from towards Tartary. These vermin being drove 

 by an east or southeast wind come into Ulcraine, where they do much 

 mischief, eating up all sorts of grain and grass, so that wheresoever 

 they come in less than two hours they crop all they find, which 

 causes great scarcity of provisions. It is not easy to express their 

 numbers, for all the air is full and darkened. In June, 1646, having ■ 

 stayed two months in a new town, called Novogorod, where I was 

 building a citadel, I was astonished to see so vast a multitude, for it 

 was prodigious to behold them, because they were hatched there that 

 si)ring and, being as yet scarce able to fly, the ground was all covered 

 and the air so full of them that I could not eat in my chamber with- 

 out a candle, all the houses being full of them, even to the stables, 

 barns, chambers, garrets and cellars. I caused cannon powder and 



