40 



between it and the shore. It was otherwise when the 

 Kings of Canaan fought in Taanach and the stars in their 

 courses fought against Sisera, for then the river Kishon 

 swept them away; and it was otherwise when previous 

 to my visit two Presbyterian ministers arrived at the 

 lodging house and, stated that they had one or both 

 fallen into the Kishon and got drenched. In the summer 

 of 1857 a star of almost supernatural brilliancy hung 

 over Olivet, and Jew and Gentile were seized with a 

 presentiment; but after all it was only a planet in its 

 circuit reflecting back the rays of the setting sun : on the 

 sixth of September an immense cloud of locust flew over 

 Odessa. The year 1860 cold and wet in Europe, was a 

 year of most sunspots. 



The Philistines on their seaboard of blown sand made 

 five golden images of the short-tailed mice which in 

 years when the frost was absent marred their fields, and 

 in 1863 Van Lennep encountered an army of rats in Asia 

 Minor that marched over the ground hke young locusts. 

 On the 20 of January 1864 the temperature at Jerusalem 

 was remarkably low and in 1865 there were clouds of 

 the Acridium peregrinum along the sandy coast at 

 Beyroot, Saida and Jaffa, where they may be seen 

 wandering about like a pale grey shade ; the inhabitants 

 of Nazareth had to give up their dwellings to the locusts, 

 Canon Tristram met with them on the banks of the 

 Jordan and the Eeverend F. W. Holland saw a flock 

 pass overhead when encamped at the foot of the Jebel 

 Musa. In 1866 Mr. Mounsey encountered a many coloured 

 flock in May at Persepohs; on the hills of Judea droves 

 of orthoptera start up before the footsteps, but having 

 no powers of flight they do not arrive in bands to destroy ; 

 their underwingstinged with coral reds and yellow are 

 very beautiful. Lady Hester Stanhop, Queen of Palmyra, 

 who kept a saddle-backed grey mare in her pleasure 

 grounds at Dahr June, near Sidon, served with sherbet 

 and delicacies, for a promised Messiah to ride on, wrote 

 to her physician half a century before hand: „All those 

 who come", presumably to Syria, ,,may go back in the 

 Turkish year 1245". Doctor Cumming, hearing of this, 

 added that number to the date of the Hegira A. D. 622 

 and the result was 1867, the year brought troubles to 

 Turkey that concerned Mr. Gladstone and according 

 to Wolf it was a year of fewest sunspots. 



Agabus a prophet came from Jerusalem to Antioch 

 and predicted a famine while the apostles Paul and 

 Barnabas were there. This says one authority, came 

 when Claudius was consul the fourth time and it must 

 not be confounded with the famine that happened when 

 he was consul the second time; it raged during his fifth, 

 sixth and seventh year: Queen Helena sent to Alexandria 

 for corn and to Cyprus for figs. Thomson, commenting 

 on the famine in Israel in the days of King Ahab, remarks, 

 that all the crops fail there when there is a drought of 

 only a few months in spring; and the prophet Amos says 

 of the same portion of northern Syria: ,,I have with- 

 holden the rain from you when there were yet three 

 months to the harvest; and I caused it to rain upon one 

 city and not upon another; one piece was rained upon 

 and piece whereupon it rained not withered' ' . When 1 870 

 came the Philistine sea coast was depopulated as the 

 inhabitants had gone into Egypt to find food. The year 

 of most sunspots followed in 1871, the year of fewest 

 came in 1878; the. winter of 1879 left behind it seventeen 

 inches of snow at Jerusalem that lay unmelted on the 

 hillsides and hollows for two or three weeks, the summer 

 that followed in Europe old people found as miserably 

 wet as 1816 had been. 



The writer of the Wisdom of Soloman desired to 

 know. „The operation of the elements, the beginning, 



ending, and midst of the times; the alteration of the 

 turning and the change of the seasons, the circuits of the 

 years and the positions of the stars." A swarm of the 

 little yellow grasshopper, Stauronotus mayoccanus in the 

 Island of Cyprus had increased to an alarming extent 

 in 1882, when Mr. S. Brown destroyed a thousand tons 

 of their eggs and Miss Gordon Cumming wrote an account 

 of it in the Nineteenth Century. The year of most sunspots 

 came in 1883 which was again wet in Europe: The sirocco 

 wind has blown as I never knew it blow before, Mr. Gibb 

 wrote to me from Algeria in 1888, the following year of 

 fewest sunspots, and the second week in July the 'town 

 of Constantine was full of locusts. Flocks of locusts 

 were heard of in Egypt and Algiers in 1891, and of field 

 mice at Athens in 1892; in 1893, the year of the cholera 

 and most sunspots, Dr. Festa found the Stauronotus 

 Maroccanus swarmjng in March in the wingless state at 

 Jericho and east of the Sea of Galilee, and at the close 

 of the summer flocks appeared at Haifa and Jerusalem, 

 as also in Marocco. After my return to Southampton 

 Miss Fitzjohn wrote to me on the 14 of June, 1898: 

 ,Last Saturday a large flock of small yellow locusts 

 came over to Jerusalem from Es-Salt and the upland 

 plain of Grilead on the other side of the Valley of the 

 Jordan; my girls were out in the garden putting them 

 into bottles of spirits and the birds went darting here, 

 there and everywhere. They passed onwards to Colonna 

 on the road to Jaffa, where some stones of a Eoman 

 station remain." The specimens sent me proved to 

 be the common plague of the coast of the Mediterranean, 

 Stauronotus Maroccanus. In 1899 Miss Fitzjohn sent me 

 word of the arrival of a smaller flock of larger, grey, Schis- 

 tocerca peregrinum at Jerusalem, enclosing specimens. 

 ,,And the fifth angel sounded", we read, and I saw 

 a star from heaven fallen unto the earth: and there was 

 given to him the key of the pit of the abyss : and he 

 opened the pit and there went up the smoke of a great 

 furnace, and out of it came forth locusts." Where the 

 sun shines bright on the sea walls of Ehodes and its 

 sparkling water murmurs stories of the Trojan war, 

 we learn from the Grecian Anthologia the inhabitants 

 kept grasshoppers and crickets, in the atrium, or garden 

 plot in the centre of their house, for the solace of their 

 trill; and here Aristodicus lamented in verse one that 

 had flown away to revel on the meadows of Clymene 

 among the golden flowers of Proserpina, or in other 

 words was dead. The leafcricket, Decticus albifrons, 

 answers to the description of these acrides that emerged 

 from the bottomless pit, and hence it is called by the 

 inhabitants of Cyprus Sacro Acrida and Lauro aurida. 

 An entomologist accustomed to diagnosis could scarcely 

 fail to read: „And the shapes of the acrides were like 

 unto horses prepared unto battle, and on their heads 

 were, as it were, crowns like unto gold and their faces 

 were as the faces of men, and they had thread-like 

 antennae as the hair of women, and their teeth were 

 as the teeth of lions, and they had breastplates as it 

 were breastplates of iron, and when their males rubbed 

 their front wings together, a minute comb under the left 

 caused a glassy patch on the right to tinkle as it were 

 a jangle of bells and the sound of chariots of many horses 

 rushing to war. Their females have tails, or ovipositors, 

 like unto scorpions." You may see and hear these 

 orthoptera in the marshlands that border the Mediter- 

 ranean, and many similar leaf-crickets populate the reeds 

 that fringe the river banks; the Greek writer Lucian, 

 a native of Samosata on the Euphrates, called them, 

 „flying scorpions that have the wings of bats". In many 

 Biblical dictionaries and pictorial Bibles they are intro- 

 duced as the locust. 



Eigentum von Fritz Rühl's Erben, Zürich. — Redaktion: M. Rühl, Zürich V. — Fritz Lehmanns Verlag, 



Druck der Schell' sehen ßnchdruckerei, V. Kraemer, Heilbronn. 



G. m. b. H., Stuttgart. 



