414 



Marvels of Insect Life. 



march, clearing off every scrap of herbage as they advance, and they did this on 

 the treated strip, eating the Paris green with the vegetation, with the result that 

 the locust pest in South Africa may now be considered a terror of the })ast. 



There are several kinds of these scourges. The migratorv locust of science ^ 

 is not the most important of these, as its range is said to be limited to South-eastern 

 Europe and Turkestan. An allied species, the ashy locust, "-^ is of wider range, 

 extending throughout Europe and Asia, from the Atlantic in the West to China 

 in the East. The wandering locust''^ is even more universal in its tours. It has 

 visited us in England, takes in Africa, Cyprus, Persia, Arabia, Afghanistan, and 

 Northern India to its eastern limits. There is a record of a swarm invading a ship 

 in the Atlantic when twelve hundred miles from the nearest land, and it is believed 

 to be one of several species of the same genus that are migratory in South 

 America, which, it has been suggested, may have been its original home. In India 



it is known as the north-west locust, that 

 being the direction from which it arrives. 

 In the earlier wingless condition, when it is 

 known as a hopper, it is very destructive 

 in the dry plains of the Punjab, where it 

 breeds. In the vast swarms in \\'hich they 

 come these locusts exhibit a great difference 

 of colouring from that assumed when they 

 settle down to the business of sowing the 

 ground with billions of their eggs. The 

 swarms have been described as red clouds, 

 and this colour is due to the fact that the 

 Insects in their nuptial dress have a rosy 

 tint ; but when they settle, this brightness 

 is dulled to a 3'ellowish-grey tint, which 

 harmonizes better with the soil. Often 

 their clouds have descended on unsuitable 

 places for their egg-la^^ing, such, for example, 

 as a railroad, with the result that millions 

 are destroyed by the rolling stock, whilst 

 their mangled remains, making the rails slippery, soon bring the railway ser\ice 

 to a standstill, and not infrequentlv have derailed the trains. 



With the extremity of their hind-bodies the females bore holes in the earth, 

 and leave in each a package of eggs, which are all glued together. Mr. E. P. 

 Stebbing, F.L.S., tells us that "Areas in which these eg^ masses have been deposited 

 look for all the world as if a heavy shower had recently passed over them, the soil 

 being pitted with small holes as if made by heavy raindrops. From these eggs 

 eventually emerge little black wingless hoppers, at first small and helpless and 

 quite unlike one's notion of a grasshopper or locust, but rapidly developing by a 

 series of moults or casting of the skin. Some few days after hatching, the 

 little ' hoppers ' pack together and move down into the cultivated lands in well- 

 ordered battalions aiid brigades and divisions, in which formation they spend the 



1 Pacliytylus migratorius. - P. cincrascens. •' Schistocerca ])ercgiina. 



Photo by] [F. Noad Clark. 



Egg of a Butterfly. 



The eggs of butterflies show considerable variety of form 

 and sculpturing. The example shown is the egg of the white 

 admiral, which is of a beautiful pale-green tint, and is laid 

 on the leaves of sallow in July, hatching about a fortnight 

 later. It is magnified twenty times. 



