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barked my fig tree ; lie hath made it clean bare and cast it away ; the branches 

 thereof are made white. * * * The field is wasted, the land moiirneth. 

 * * * Be ye ashamed, O, ye husbandmen; howl, O, ye vinedressers, for the 

 wheat and for the barley, because the harvest of the field is perished. 



In 1881, Dr. Hagen published, in the columns of the New Yorker 

 Belletristisches Journal (August 16), an interesting article entitled 

 "Heuschrecken-Kommissionenim Mittelalter und heute, " in which he 

 showed that grasshopper invasions have taken place since time imme- 

 morial, and that man's efforts to combat them have always ended in 

 his discomfiture. It is not surprising, therefore, says Dr. Hagen, that 

 the helpless multitude called on the intervention of the law and of God 

 to deliver them from such pests; and the legislators on one side and the 

 priests on the other were forced to carry out the will of the people. 

 But since written laws and legislative decrees against elemental plagues 

 would have been ridiculous without a surrounding of imposing, legally 

 regulated forms, the development of these formalities gradually reached 

 a high degree of perfection. Legislation for defense against injurious 

 animals reached its highest development in the Middle Ages. Legal 

 procedures against all sorts of noxious animals were frequent, and the 

 famous Burgundian legal light, Bartholomaeus Chassanaeus, wrote a book 

 setting forth the rules according to which a suit against grasshoppers 

 should be entered. After a court had been called together by written 

 request, a judge was appointed and two lawyers were elected, one to 

 plead the cause of the people and one the cause of the accused grass- 

 hoppers. The former commenced by formulating the charge, and con- 

 cluded by requesting that the grasshoppers be burned. The defend- 

 ant's lawyer replied that such a request was illegal before the grassliop- 

 pers had been requested in due form to leave the country. When, how- 

 ever, they had not left the country after a stated term, they could be 

 excommunicated. Many years afterward, another jurist, Hiob Ludolph, 

 wrote a pamphlet antagonizing Chassanaeus' work, setting forth the 

 lamentable legal ignorance displayed by the latter. The accused grass- 

 hoppers, said Ludolph, must be summoned four times before the court, 

 and if they do not appear, then they should be dragged by force before 

 the court. Then only can the suit proceed. Other interested parties, 

 however, shall be heard, namely, the birds that feed on the grasshop- 

 pers. Further, it would be a great injustice to banish the grasshoppers 

 into adjacent territories. Finally, the code proposed by Chassanaeus 

 can never be brought into accordance with the laws and rules of the 

 Church, because there is absolutely nothing in those laws about suits 

 against grasshoppers. 



Several suits against injurious insects were brought before the 

 courts, and the rulings have been preserved. In one case (1479) a suit 

 was brought against injurious worms, apparently cutworms, in the 

 canton of Berne, Switzerland. The worms, although ably defended, 

 lost the suit, and were excommunicated by the archbishop and banished. 

 Kegarding the effect of this awful punishment, the chronicler who relates 



