26 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XIII 
full well the meaning of his text. We in the eastern United 
States can have no conception of the terror of the frequent 
swarms of the migratory locust in eastern Asia and northern 
Africa, where fields of grain are eaten to the ground in an hour, 
where the ravage of a single swarm forced almost every horse in 
Mesopotamia into starvation, where there is recorded a pile of 
dead locusts, sixty feet wide, three feet high, and a hundred miles 
long, the stench from which offended the senses for several 
hundred miles. The modern Arabic word arbah is a very general 
term for locust, just as our own unscientific laymen apply the 
word grasshopper indiscriminately to all species of a dozen fami- 
lies of the Orthoptera. 
The word arbeh next appears in Leviticus, XI, 22: “ye may 
eat; the arbeh after his kind, the solam after his kind, and the 
chargol after his kind, and the chagab after his kind. But all 
other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an 
abomination unto you.” 
From time immemorial almost all peoples have eaten grass- 
hoppers, either dried, pickled or freshly boiled. They have been 
food staples with North and South American Indians, Kamchat- 
kans, Arabs, and many others. They were highly esteemed by 
the Greeks during the most intellectual period and recipes are 
extant for preserving them for winter use. Beetles have not 
frequently been used for human food. The Romans considered 
a certain beetle larva as a great delicacy, generally pickling it. 
_ They called it Cossonus, and it was probably one of the large 
Scarabaeids, certainly not the evil-smelling goat moths to which 
Linneus erroneously applied the name. The adult Melolontha 
is still eaten, although mostly by children. | 
In Entomological News some years ago there appeared a con- 
tributed short note, stating that beetles were only once mentioned 
in the Bible, and that in an edible capacity, etc. The translators 
chosen by King James were the most eminent scholars of the 
time, but entomological knowledge was extremely limited. Even 
the Theatrum Animalium of Thomas Moufet had not been pub- 
lished, and there were not enough words in the language to fill 
requirements. So the translators called the arbeh locust, as they 
already had in Exodus. For solam they either found or invented 
