150 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



of the muslin : oblong, equally rounded at both ends, white, 

 glossy. The young larva; began to apjjear on the twelfth 

 day, June 16th, and attached themselves to the lower edge of 

 the leaves, generally with the anterior part of the body curled 

 in after the manner of the Ionic volute, and apparently moving 

 only to bend down to feed. 



P. H. Jennings. 

 Longfiekl Eectory, Gravesend, 

 June 19, 1875. 



The Plague of Locusts in America. By Edward Newman. 



Thf, Colorado potato-bug, although causing serious and 

 perhaps not altogether groundless anxiety to our transatlantic 

 cousins, has been a source of unalloyed pleasure and profit 

 to ourselves, Doryphora 10-lineata, for so it is called, has 

 brought more substantial sustenance to the penny-a-liners of 

 St. Giles's and the Strand than Solanum tuberosum itself; 

 more lasting fame to our natural-history scribes and wonder- 

 mongers than the last new novel on Evolution. The half- 

 starved literary hack; the fashionable novelist; the mystical 

 purveyors of the grand results of scientific research ; the 

 slip-shod conversationist of society; — have equal cause to 

 fall on their knees and thank Providence for this inestimable 

 boon. But while we are thus paying this just tribute to the 

 fertility of American soil and imagination, we are forgetting 

 that America herself is suffering under the direst insect- 

 scourge that ever afflicted the human race, — a scourge that 

 has brought disease, desolation, dearth, and death, into 

 thousands of once happy homesteads. 



Until very lately we have rarely heard of locusts as one of 

 the plagues of America. Egypt has long been celebrated as 

 the mother and nurse of locusts, the seat and centre of locust 

 devastation, whence the plague has spread east and west and 

 south ; the north only owes its immunity to the fact that the 

 country is there bounded by the sea, which presents no 

 harvest adapted to its requirings ; and even northwards the 

 locust has penetrated I'urkey, Greece, Italy, France, and 

 Spain, neither of which countries has enjoyed perfect 

 immunity from the death-fraught visits. 



