OKTHOPTEKA. 303 



locusts (Arbeth) come over the whole land of Egypt, as the eighth 

 plague, destined to intimidate Pharaoh, who had rebelled against 

 Him. These insects arrived, brought by an east wind, and covered 

 the surface of the country to such a degree that the air was 

 darkened by them.* 



They ate up all the herbs of the field and all the fruit of the 

 trees which the hail (the seventh plague) had left. A west wind 

 swept 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 devas- 

 tated 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 eat 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 

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



* " And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord 

 brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night ; and when it 

 was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And the locusts went up over all 

 the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt ; very grievous were they ; 

 before them were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. For 

 they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened ; and they 

 did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left ; 

 and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, 

 through all the land of Egypt." Exod. x. 1315. 



AL-L, I * &~ 



