288 DIVISION III. ARTICULATED ANIMALS.—CLASS IV. INSECTA. 
vigor with difficulty, and, in the case of orchard trees, remain one or two 
years without bearing fruit. It is principally the trees skirting woods, and 
situated along cultivated fields, which are exposed to the ravages of the 
Cock-chafer, because the larvw of these insects are developed in the fields. 
In the interior of forests they are never met with in great numbers. 
In certain years Cock-chafers multiply in such a frightful manner that they 
devastate the whole vegetation of a country. M. Louis Figuier, in his 
“Insect World,” says that, in the environs of Blois, fourteen thousand 
Cock-chafers 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 prodigious extent to which Cock-chafers increase under certain cir- 
cumstances, 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 Cock-chafers, precipi- 
tated by a violent wind into the Lake of Zurich, formed on the shore a thick 
bank of bodies heaped, one on the other, the putrid exhalations from which 
poisoned the atmosphere. On May 18, 1852, 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. Mul- 
sant, in his “ Monographie des Lamellicornes de la France,” relates that, in 
May, 1841, clouds of Cock-chafers traversed the Sadne, from the south-east 
in the direction of the north-west, and settled in the vineyards of the Macon- 
nais; 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 he whirled a stick rapidly round and round to protect him- 
self against their touch. 
This is a remarkable statement, but the French imagination is very 
creative. 
