130 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. VILL. 
destroying the pest. A plan was tried of marching lines of beaters, armed 
with bundles of twigs, through the fields, beating the ground so as to crush 
the young locust. This was to some extent successful in short grass, but could 
not be made use of with growing crops. The plan of dragging country blankets 
rapidly over a field where locusts were to be found, and squeezing up the cloth 
every few yards to kill the insects which had been caught, was found useful 
in bushy tracts, but required, for its successful working, a good deal of activity 
and intelligence. The most successful method consisted in dragging over the 
fields a capacious bag, five or six feet deep by eight or ten feet long and much 
like a huge bolster case, but open at the side, instead of at theend. This was 
held by two men, one at each end, and was run along over the grass or young 
crops, to catch the locusts, which tumbled in, and, being unable to escape 
could, from time to time, be killed by twisting up the bag. This was found 
to be asimple and easy means of destroying the locusts, and the people took 
to it readily all over the locust-affected area. Little or no injury was done to 
the crops by the men working it, and millions of insects were killed. 
With regard to the numbers destroyed during the locust invasion, the 
Collector of Nasik reported the destruction in his collectorate alone of some 
forty-five tons of locusts, which he estimated must have represented about a 
thousand millions of individual locusts. Similarly in the Satara collectorate one 
hundred and eighty tons were reported to have been destroyed by the local 
officials. 'The numbers destroyed in these two collectorates were no doubt 
greater than in most of the collectorates which suffered from the locusts, but 
the figures give some idea of the extent of the invasion. 
With regard to the identity of the locust of 1882-83, Dr. Macdonald in his 
report in the Indian Forester, Vol. X, advanced the 
supposition that the insect was Acridium peregrinum, 
and this name was adopted in most of the official reports which subsequently 
appeared. There seems, however, to be conclusive proof that the insect 
belonged to some other species. In the reports, both of Lieutenant-Colonel 
Swinhoe and of Lieutenant-Colonel Bradford, the locust of Rajputana, which 
is undoubtedly Acridiwm peregrinum, is spoken of as distinct from the Bombay 
locust of 1882-83. <Acridium peregrinum has been shown to be essentially the 
inhabitant of sandy deserts, while the Bombay locust of 1882-83 originated in 
the tropical forests of the Western Ghats. The habits also of the Bombay 
locust of 1882-83 differed materially from those of Acridiwm peregrinum, in that 
the young wingless larve of Acridium peregrinum can be readily driven into 
traps, while those of the Bombay species entirely declined to be destroyed 
in this manner. Again, specimens said to be “ locust’? were sent from the 
Bombay Presidency in 1883 to the well-known entomologist Mr. F. Moore, 
who identified them as belonging to no less than five species, namely :—Acri- 
dium succinctum, Caloptenus erubescens, Caloptenus caliginosus, Cyrtacanthacres 
ranacea, and Oxya furcifera; Acridium peregrinum being unrepresented—a 
The identity of the locust. 
