Liberia '4^ 



entertainment has been quite destroyed for the writer of these 

 lines by the sight of the cockroaches scurrying over the carpet. 



These insects, as elsewhere in the tropics, do not hesitate 

 at night to attack human beings who are asleep. They creep 

 to the corners of the mouth of the sleeping person to suck the 

 saliva. They eat the toe-nails down to the quick, and above 

 all, they gnaw at any sore place or ulcer on the skin, so that 

 they may become almost dangerous. The Europeans who have 

 experienced these horrors, however, are in most circumstances 

 entirely to blame, as no one in these lands should sleep without 

 the protection of a mosquito curtain, which if well tucked under 

 the bed-clothes would keep out cockroaches like other insects. 

 Dr. Biittikofer relates that he only saved his body from attack 

 at one time by placing bowls of rice and sugar in his bedroom 

 as a counter-attraction. It is difficult to understand why the 

 simple expedient of a mosquito curtain did not occur to him. 

 The present writer has been attacked in a somewhat similar way, 

 but on board dirty and uncomfortable steamers on the West 

 Coast a good many years ago. In the bunks of these steamers 

 cockroaches swarmed, and there were of course no mosquito 

 curtains to shield the unfortunate passenger, who would wake in 

 the dead of night, in black darkness, to find two or three large 

 cockroaches clinging to his lips. 



Locusts as a plague are not unheard of in Liberia, rumours 

 occasionally reaching the western part of that country of locusts' 

 ravages on the Mandingo Plateau. But damage is done to 

 vegetation in Liberia rather from what we should style grass- 

 hoppers than locusts. In some parts of the interior the 

 Liberian indigenes collect certain grasshoppers or locusts, the 

 repulsive large-headed, fat-bodied crickets, or the equally 

 repulsive cicadas, and, after frying them in palm oil, grind up 

 the insects into a powder which is eaten as a sauce. 



848 



