October. '09] JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 317 



sulfur to be burnt to expel them, but all to no purpose, for when the 

 door was opened an infinite number came in^ and the others went out, 

 fluttering" about. And it was a troublesome thing when a man went 

 abroad to be hit on the face by those creatures, sometimes on the nose, 

 sometimes on the eyes, and sometimes on the cheek, so there was no 

 opening one's mouth but some would get in. Yet all this Avas noth- 

 ing, for when we were to eat, these creatures gave us no respite, and 

 when we went to cut a bit of meat we cut a locust with it, and when 

 a man opened his mouth to put in a morsel he w'as sure to chew one 

 of them. I have seen them at night, when they sit to rest them, that 

 the roads were four inches thick of them one upon another, so that 

 the horses would not trample over them, but as they were put on with 

 much lashing, pricking up their ears, snorting and treading very fear- 

 fulh". The wheels of our carts and the feet of our horses bruising 

 those creatures, there came from them such a stink as not only of- 

 fended the nose but the brain. I was not able to endure the stench, 

 but was forced to wash my nose in vinegar and hold a handkerchief 

 dipped in it continually to my nostrils."^ Some of my hearers doubt- 

 less remember the devastation wrought in the states of the western 

 Mississippi valley from the close of the Civil War until about 1876. 

 So serious was the locust plague in some of the richest of these states 

 that immigration to them was greatly discouraged, and the settlers al- 

 ready there were subjected to the severest privations. Every year 

 local districts or great areas in the provinces of the British North- 

 west, in the Dakotas, in IMinnesota and in neighboring states must 

 wage vigorous warfare against some of the various species of grass- 

 hoppers, often piling the dead insects captured in the hopper-dozers in 

 windrows and heaps of such extent that the air for miles is polluted 

 with the stench. 



The mighty power of destruction possessed by these insects when 

 massed together may be inferred from the extent of a swarm passing 

 over the Red Sea in November, 1889, which spread out over 2,000 

 square miles in area; and from the fact that in the island of Cyprus 

 in 1881 1,300 tons of locust eggs were destroyed. 



To instance other insects with extraordinary capacity for damage, 

 the Hessian fly may be cited. It attacks wheat, barley and rye. Pro- 

 fessor Webster estimated that the damage in Ohio for the season of 

 1900 alone amounted to more than $15,000,000. For the entire United 

 States the average annual damage caused by Hessian fly is considered 

 by the best informed experts to be about $40,000,000. The chinch 

 liusr is estimated to inflict an average annual loss of $7,000,000 on the 



''Tiiken from Second Report U. S. Ent. Comm. on Rocky Mountain Locust. 



