6 



substantive ; the word Terr/I being synonymous with cicada. Those 

 great masters have been imitated by all their successors, and have 

 taken the Gnjllus J\ligratorius, the great architype of the cicadas, 

 as their pattern. This great monarch of the genus has given the 

 law to all others, not only to his own subjects, but the whole sci- 

 ence of entomology, where the faintest similitude can be found. In 

 common parlance and scientific writings, we find the same error. His 

 history presents a melancholy retrospect of national waste, and his 

 return is held up in terror to the Eastern and Southern continents. 

 His flights are marked through states and empires, by his devasta- 

 tions of the vegetable kingdom, and his name is coupled with pesti- 

 lence and famine, two of the great scourges of the human race. 

 He constituted one of the seven plagues of JEgypt, and was threa- 

 tened as a vindictive visilation by the prophet Joel. The only 

 atonement he has made for all the miseries he has inflicted, is the 

 precarious subsistence he afforded (together with wild honey) to 

 John the Baptist, in his journey through the wilderness. 



It would not be possible at this remote period, to ascertain the 

 precise sense in which the Romans entertained the words locusta 

 and cicada. They employed both, but there is no word in the 

 Greek synonymous with locusta, more than is conveyed by T f rr;|; 

 and they must either have intended to designate two different in- 

 sects, or, with the moderns, applied the word locusta to the larger, 

 and cicada to the smaller varieties of that numerous genus. 



A brief comparison will so contract the two genera, that our 

 reasons for separating them will, we think, be conclusive. 



The cicadae are herbivorous, voracious and highly destructive, 

 while the locust can scarcely be said to subsist on vegetable matter. 

 They have no teeth nor mandibles, and in the proper sense, no 

 mouth. It imbibes its aliment by an apparatus that belongs to none 

 of the cicadae. The cicadae have jaws and teeth which arm them 

 with the power of destruction to the vegetable kingdom. We 

 were lately favoured with a fine opportunity of comparing the 

 great monarch of the cicadae with our locust. A perfect specimen, 

 male and female, of the Gryllus Migratorius, brought from -(Egypt 



