PLAGUE OF GRASSHOPPEES. 105 



prices of produce low. As population increases, a higher 

 class will come in, will purchase the exhausted farms, and 

 for their skill and manure will obtain from the soil new 

 returns, as large, and perhaps as profitable as those which 

 rewarded the men who first penetrated the bush. Or if 

 such men do not come in, and the land still continues in 

 the hands of the original clearers, or their sons, the good 

 of the country will demand that steps should be taken 

 to instruct and enlighten them in regard to the principles 

 of agriculture, and by degrees to wean them from an 

 agricultural routine which is no longer either the most 

 profitable to the individual, or adapted to the altered 

 circumstances of the country. 



In walking over Mr Porter's farm, my attention was 

 drawn to the vast number of grasshoppers which were 

 jumping about, not only in his grass, but in his turnip 

 fields. I had observed them previously in considerable 

 numbers at various places on the St John Eiver, but here 

 the land seemed almost alive with them. They appear 

 during the hot weather of midsummer and autumn, and 

 attack the turnip crops as well as the grass, sometimes 

 entirely stripping them of their leaves. If the young- 

 turnips are not sufficiently forward by the middle or end 

 of July, when the grasshoppers begin to swarm, they are 

 sometimes entirely destroyed. This is a pest of which 

 our British turnip-growers, so far as I am aware, have 

 no cause to complain. 



In New England, five or six difi'erent grasshoppers, 

 besides as many species of locust, appear in their warm 

 summers. In Massachusetts, the grass in the meadows 

 and moist fields is filled with myriads of small grass- 

 hoppers, of a light green colour, which do much injury 

 to the grass. But, in New England, grasshoppers 

 are not generally distinguished from the small varieties 

 of locusts which are common in that country. One of 

 these, the small red-legged locust, about an inch in 



