176 NATURAL HISTORY. [CH. XII, 



whole were exterminated. The people spread can- 

 vass, and going opposite to it set up great cries, 

 which drove the insects against it. They were col- 

 lected and sent in sacks to the government. In 

 Italy a similar means caused twelve thousand sacks 

 to be collected. Huge graves were made, and these 

 collections rammed down into them and covered 

 with quick-lime. 



These insects, terrible scourges as they are to 

 man, are nevertheless ministers of beneficial changes 

 in the economy of nature. They clear away those 

 rank and noxious weeds which choke the soil, and 

 thus allow the earth to appear in a far more beauti- 

 ful dress, clothed with new herbs, superb lilies, and 

 fresh annual grasses and young shoots of the peren- 

 nial kinds, affording delicious herbage for the wild 

 cattle and game. They turn up and excavate the 

 surface of deserts, in fulfilling their instinct of de- 

 positing their eggs ; and as subsequent rains kill 

 both them and their young brood, furnish a manure 

 in places inaccessible to the approach of man. 



They also serve as food, not only to birds, but even 

 to man. Pliny mentions that it was an ordinary 

 delicacy among the Parthians ; and Diodorus Siculus 

 asserts that the ^Ethiopians subsisted on them. 

 Whenever visited by these insects, they pursued 

 them with great cries, which causing them to fall 

 they gathered them in heaps, and sprinkling them 

 over with salt, thus preserved them for future use. 

 Leo Africanus says that the Arabians and Lybians 

 rejoiced in the coming of the locust, which they 

 caught and ate either boiled or dried in the sun. 

 Beda mentions that the poor of Palestine soaked 

 these insects in oil and used them as food. In fact, 

 most of the nations who have been visited by this 

 pest have probably, in the first instance, been obliged 

 to feed on the locust through necessity, and have 

 continued it subsequently from choice. 



The Jews evidently were riot only allowed to 



