ORDER VI. ORTHOPTERA. — LOCUSTS. 299 
parture, leaving behind it despair and famine. It goes to look for fresh food — 
seeking whom, or rather, in this case, what, it may devour! During the 
year succeeding that in which a country has been devastated by showers of 
locusts, damage from these insects is the less to be feared; for it happens 
often that, after having ravaged everything, they die of hunger before the 
laying season begins. ; 
But their death becomes the cause of a greater evil. Their innumerable 
carcasses, lying in heaps and heated by the sun, are not long in entering 
into a state of putrefaction; epidemic diseases, caused by the poisonous 
gases emanating from them, soon break out and decimate the population. 
These locusts are bred in the deserts of Arabia and Tartary, and the east 
winds carry them into Africa and Europe. Ships in the eastern parts of 
the Mediterranean are sometimes covered with them at a great distance from 
the land. “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 devastated the environs of Capua. In the year of 
our Lord 181, they committed great ravages in the north of Italy and in 
Gaul. 
“Tn 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 cer- 
tain places where they had died,’ writes the Abbé Ussares, 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 sig- 
nified God’s wrath. The rains killed these insects; they infected the air ; 
and the cattle, which ate them in the grass, died immediately.’ 
“In 1709 locusts stopped the army of Charles XII., King of Sweden, 
as it was retreating from Bessarabia, on its defeat at Pultowa. The king 
thought that he was assailed by a hail-storm when a host of these insects 
beat violently against his army, as it was passing through a defile, so that 
men and horses were blinded by this living hail, falling from a cloud which 
hid the sun. The arrival of the locusts had been announced by a whistling 
sound like that which precedes a tempest ; and the noise of their flight quite 
overpowered the noise made by the Black Sea. All the country round about 
was soon laid waste on their route. During the same year a great part of 
Europe was invaded by these pests, the newspapers of the day being full 
of accounts relating to this public calamity. In 1755 Portugal was attacked 
by them. ‘This was the year of the earthquake of Lisbon, and all sorts of 
plagues seemed at this time to rage furiously in that unfortunate country.” 
