OETHOPTEEA. 311 



speaks of the natives of Ethiopia, who live on locusts, as dying 

 eaten up by winged insects bred in their own bodies. 



It is difficult to explain the origin of such fables. Travellers 

 who have visited Arabia agree in declaring that the locust is a 

 most wholesome article of food ; that it is even fattening. At any 

 rate,. it is good food for cattle and poultry. The ancients employed 

 locusts in medicine. Dioscorides asserts that the thighs of the 

 locust, reduced to powder, and mixed with the blood of the he- 

 goat, is a cure for leprosy ; and mixed with wine, is a specific 

 against the bite of the scorpion, &c. 



It remains for us to describe some other species of grasshoppers 

 less destructive in their ravages than the Acrydium moratorium. 



In the deserts of Egypt is to be met with the great Eremobia, 

 and in South America the Ommexa, which walks rather than 

 springs. On the other hand, the Tetrix springs very well. A 

 remarkable feature about them is their thorax, which is prolonged 

 into a point, and covers the whole body. They are small insects 

 of gay and brilliant colours, and generally remain on the leaves of 

 low .plants, and escape easily from the hand that tries to catch 

 them. The Tetrix subulata y of a brownish colour, is common 

 during spring, in the environs of Paris, in the woods, and in 

 dry and arid fields. The Pneumorce are very strange insects. 

 The males have a very prominent abdomen, which resembles a 

 bladder, filled with air ; and their wings are very much developed. 

 The females have the abdomen of the ordinary shape ; their wings 

 are very short, or even quite rudimentary. The former produce 

 a sharp stridulation, by rubbing their hind-legs against a row of 

 small tubercules, which are to be seen on each side of the abdomen. 

 The sound is rendered still more penetrating by the vesiculous or 

 bladder-like abdomen, the skin of which is stretched as tight as 

 a drum. The Pneumorce inhabit the South of Africa, as also do the 

 Truxales, a few varieties of which, however, are to be met with 

 in Spain, Sicily, and the South of France. 



We will pass in silence over a great number of other less in- 

 teresting species of Orthoptera. Those which we have described 

 suffice to justify us in what we said above, namely, that this order 

 contains insects of the strangest and most anomalous forms. 



