ORTHOPTERA. 305 



them away again, when Pharaoh had at last promised to allow the 

 children of Israel to depart. 



Pliny relates that in many places in Greece a law obliged the 

 inhabitants to wage war against the locusts three times a year ; that 

 is to say, in their three states of egg, larva, and adult. In the Isle of 

 Lemnos the citizens had to pay as taxes so many measures of locusts. 

 In the year 170 before our era they devastated the environs of 

 Capua. In the year of our Lord 181 they committed great ravages 

 in the north of Italy and in Gaul. In 1690 locusts arrived in Poland 

 and Lithuania by three different ways, and, as it were, in three 

 different bodies. "They were to be found in certain places where 

 they had died," writes the Abbe Ussaris, an eye-witness, " lying on 

 one another in heaps of four feet in height. Those which were alive, 

 perched upon the trees, bending their branches to the ground, so 

 great was their number. The people thought that they had Hebrew 

 letters on their wings. A rabbi professed to be able to read on 

 them words which signified God's wrath. The rains killed these 

 insects : they infected the air ; and the cattle, which ate them in the 

 grass, died immediately." 



In 1749 locusts stopped the army of Charles XII., King of 

 Sweden, as it was retreating from Bessarabia, on its defeat at 

 Pultowa. The king thought that he was assailed by a hailstorm, 

 when a host of these insects beat violently against his army as it was 

 passing through a defile, so that men and horses were blinded by 

 this living hail, falling from a cloud which hid the sun. The arrival 

 of the locusts had been announced by a whistling sound like that 

 which precedes a tempest ; and the noise of their flight quite over- 

 powered the noise made by the Black Sea. All the country round 

 about was soon laid waste on their route. During the same year a 

 great part of Europe was invaded by these pests, the newspapers of 

 the day being full of accounts relating to this public calamity. In 

 1753 Portugal was attacked by them. This was the year of the 

 earthquake of Lisbon, and all sorts of plagues seemed at this time 

 to rage in that unfortunate country. 



In 1780, in Transylvania, their ravages assumed such gigantic 

 proportions that it was found necessary to call in the assistance of 

 the army. Regiments of soldiers gathered them together and en- 

 closed them in sacks. Fifteen hundred persons were employed in 

 crushing, burying, and burning them ; but, in spite of all this, their 

 number did not seem to diminish; but a cold wind, which fortunately 

 sprang up, caused them to disappear. In the following spring the 

 plague broke out again, and every one turned out to fight against it. 



u 



