26 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ONTARIO. 



itB legs from theirs as if it were drawing off its boots. In a few minuteB it is fully devel- 

 oped, and is ready for feeding, for pairing and for flight. 



Our largest Quebec locust, (Edipoda Carolina, Burm., measures about three inches 

 and a quarter in expanse of wings. The (Edipoda migratoria of Palestine is double that 

 in size. But it must not be forgotten that the locust plague of Egypt was a unique and 

 miraculous visitation. We are expressly told that " Before them there were no such 

 locusts as they, neither after them shall be such.' They came on an east wind that had 

 blown for a day and a night. Traditions concerning them must have lingered long, and 

 probably gained in the telling ; and so it is not, perhaps, very strange that Pliny the 

 elder should have heard of locusts from India that had a length of three feet and legs so 

 set with spines that the women used them for hand-saws. Men in Pliny's time could 

 doubtless " draw the long bow " and listen, auribus patentibus, to travellers' wondera. 

 In our day we tell bear stories, moose stories atid fish stories. It seems that in Pliny's 

 day they told locust stories. 



I have in my collection a locust from the tropics which has an expansion of 

 wings of nine inches, and its legs are four inches long. This formidable insect is 

 hard, warty, and crested like a lizard, and its wings are of a dark blood-red. Fancy 

 creatures such as this descending in " numbers numberless " — darkening the sky — 

 tumultuous — bewildering — beating in your face — clinging to your hair and clothing — 

 writhing under your feet — whirring, clattering, gnawing all around you —devouring 

 everything eatable, and then in the rage of hunger falling upon one another. 



The scene is too horrible. Yet it is one that has teen often witnessed. The Tar- 

 tars tell of men smothered by locusts.* And but a few months ago it was stated that 

 a French explorer had been overpowered by locusts, and when the swarm lifted and men 

 came they found a skeleton. 



The Hebrew word Arbeh which, as we have seen, is translated locusts or grasshop- 

 pers, originally signified multitudinous. It is translated in the Septuagint akris ; in the 

 Vulgate locusta, and in Suker's German Bible, henschrecke. In Judges, vi. 5, and in 

 Jeremiah, xlvi., our English translators rendered if grasshoppers. It is generally 

 believed to have been the (Edipoda migratoria. The wandering locust according to mod- 

 ern term — the swarming locust according to the ancient appellation. 



It was my good fortune to see and to capture several specimens of this interesting 

 insect when I was a boy. After long- prevailing south east winds, they had been brought, 

 probably from Spain or Africa, to the east coast of England. Certainly I accounted it 

 a noble creature, with its helmeted front and its wide-spreading, fan-like under- wings, 

 which one might fancy to be formed of delicate green gauze. When it alighted its 

 horny feet came down together with a clatter that was startling. 



Another word is in frequent use in the Jewish Scriptures to denote locusts. It is 

 Chagab, which is derived from a word that signifies to veil or cover — The swarms 

 cover the earth and veil the sun. By our English translators Chagab is usually 

 rendered grasshoppers ; and in the connection in which it is employed it suggests the 

 idea of smallness, as in Numbers xm. 33 : " And there we saw the giants, the 3ons 

 of Anak, which came of the giants ; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and 

 so we were in their sight." It became in the late Hebrew a collective name for the 

 locust tribe (see Speaker's Commentary). It is thought to have been especially applied 

 to the species Acridium peregrinum. 



There is a third kind of locust quite common in the East, the Acridium lineolum. 



One of the insects that the Israelites were allowed to take for food was the l< Bald 

 Locust " of our English Bible — the Salam of the Hebrew. The latter term means a con- 

 sumer. This insect is believed by Wood to have been a Truxalis, a kind of locusts with 

 enlongated heads suggestive of baldness. 



* Kirby and Spence's Entomology, Letter VII. 



