450 THE INSECT WORLD. 



environs of Blois fourteen thousand cockchafers were picked up by 

 children in a few days. At Fontainebleau they could have gathered 

 as many in a certain year in as many hours. Sometimes they 

 congregate in swarms like locusts, and migrate from one 

 locality to another, when they lay waste everything. To present 

 an idea of the prodigous extent to which cockchafers increase 

 under certain circumstances, we will give a few statistics : 

 In 1574, these insects were so abundant in England that they 

 stopped many mills on the Severn. In 1688, in the county of 

 Galway, in Ireland, they formed such a black cloud that the sky 

 was darkened for the distance of a league, and the country people 

 had great difficulty in making their hay in the places where they 

 alighted. They destroyed the whole of the vegetation in such a 

 way that the landscape assumed the desolate appearance of winter. 

 Their voracious jaws made a noise which may be compared to 

 that produced by the sawing of a large piece of wood; and in 

 the evening the buzzing of their wings resembled the distant 

 rolling of drums. The unfortunate Irish were reduced to the 

 necessity of cooking their invaders, and for the want of any other 

 food, of eating them. In 1804, immense swarms of cockchafers, 

 precipitated by a violent wind into the Lake of Zurich, formed on 

 the shore a thick bank of bodies heaped up one on the other, 

 the putrid exhalations from which poisoned the atmosphere. On 

 May 18, 1832, at nine o'clock in the evening, a legion of cock- 

 chafers assailed a diligence on the road from Gournay to Gisors, 

 just as it was leaving the village of Talmontiers, the horses, 

 blinded and terrified, refused to advance, and the driver was 

 obliged to return as far as the village, to wait till this new sort 

 of hail- storm was over. M. Mulsant, in his " Monographic des 

 Lamellicornes de la France," relates that in May, 1841, clouds 

 of cockchafers traversed the Saone, from the south-east in the 

 direction of the north-west, and settled in the vineyards of the 

 Maconnais. The streets of the town of Macon were so full of 

 them that they were shovelled up with spades. At certain hours, 

 one could not pass over the bridge unless one whirled a stick 

 rapidly round and round, to protect oneself against their touch. 



The coupling takes place towards the end of May, after 

 which the males die; the females only surviving them for 



