﻿OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 157 



Their flight may be likened to an immense snow storm, extending 

 from the ground to a height at which our visual organs perceive them 

 only as minute, darting scintillations — leaving the imagination to pic- 

 ture them indefinite distances beyond. " When on the highest peaks 

 of the snowy range, fourteen or fifteen thousand feet above the sea, 

 I have seen them filling the air as much higher as they could be 

 distinguished with a good field glass."* It is a vast cloud of animated 

 specks, glittering against the sun. On the horizon they often appear 

 as a dust tornado, riding up on the wind like an ominous hail storm, 

 eddying and whirling about like the wild dead leaves in an Autumn 

 storm, and finally sweeping up to and past you, with a power that is 

 irresistible. They move mainly with the wind and when there is no 

 wind they whirl about in the air like swarming bees. If a passing 

 swarm suddenly meets with a change in the atmosphere, " such as the 

 approach of a thunder-storm, or gale of wind, they come down pre- 

 cipitately, seeming to fold their wings, and fall by the force of 

 gravity, thousands being killed by the fall, if it is upon stone or other 

 hard surface."! In alighting, they circle in myriads about you, beating 

 against everything animate or inanimate ; driving into open doors 

 and windows; heaping about your feet and around your buildings; 

 their jaws constantly at work biting and testing all things in seeking 

 what they can devour. In the midst of the incessant buzz and noise 

 which such a flight produces ; in face of the unavoidable destruction- 

 everywhere going on, one is bewildered and awed at the collective 

 power of the ravaging host, which calls to mind so forcibly the 

 plagues of Egypt. 



The noise their myriad jaws make when engaged in their work of 

 destruction, can be realized by any one who has "■ fought" a prairie 

 fire, or heard the flames passing along before a brisk wind : the low 

 crackling and rasping — the general eff'ect of the two sounds, are very 

 similar. Southy, in his Thalaba,;!; most graphically pictures this noise 

 produced by the flight and approach of locubts : 



' ' Onward they come, a dark, continuous cloud 

 Of. congregated myriads numberless, 

 The rushing of whose wings was as the sound 

 Of a hroad river headlong in its course 

 Plunged from a mountain summit, or tlie roar 

 Of a wild ocean in the Autumn storm, 

 Shattering its billows on a shore of rocks !" 



Nothing, however, can surpass the prophet Joel's account of the 



* Wm. N. Byers, Am. Entomologist, I. p. 94. 



t Wm. N. Byers, Ilayden's Geol. Suvv. , 1870, p. 2S2. 



