236 THE COCK-CHAFER, 



the humming noise of their wings sounded like 

 distant drums. Their numbers were so great that, 

 for the space of two or three square miles, they en- 

 tirely darkened the air. Persons travelling on the 

 roads, or who were abroad in the fields, found 

 it difficult to make their way home, as the insects 

 were continually beating against their faces, and 

 caused great pain. In a very short time the leaves 

 of all the trees for some miles round were destroyed, 

 leaving the whole country, though it was near mid- 

 summer, as naked and desolate as it would have 

 been in the middle of winter. The noise that these 

 enormous swarms made in seizing and devouring 

 the leaves, was so loud as to have been compared to 

 the distant sawing of timber. Swine and poultry 

 destroyed them in vast numbers. These waited un- 

 der the trees for the clusters dropping, and devoured 

 such swarms as to become fat from them alone. 

 Even the native Irish, from the insects having eaten 

 up the whole of the produce of the ground, adopted 

 a mode of dressing them, and used them as food. 

 Towards the end of summer they disappeared so 

 suddenly that in a few days there was not a single 

 one left *. 



About sixty years ago a farm near Norwich was 

 so infested with Cock-chafers that the farmer and 

 his servants affirmed that they gathered eighty bush- 

 els of them ; and the grubs had done so much in- 

 jury that the court of that city, in compassion to the 

 poor fellow's misfortune, allowed him 25 1. 



* Phil. Tran. xix. p. 74.1. 



