ORTHOPTERA. 311 
natives of Ethiopia, who live on locusts, as dying eaten up by 
winged insects bred in their own bodies. 
It is difficult to explain the origin of such fables. Travellers 
who have visited Arabia agree in declaring that the locust is a 
most wholesome article of food; that it is even fattening. At any 
rate, it is good food for cattle and poultry. The ancients employed 
locusts in medicine. JDuioscorides asserts that the thighs of the 
locust, reduced to powder,.and mixed with the blood of the he- 
goat, is a cure for leprosy ; and mixed with wine, is a specific 
against the bite of the scorpion, &c. 
It remains for us to describe some other species of grasshoppers 
less destructive in their ravages than the Acridium migratorium. 
In the deserts of Egypt is to be met with the great Hremobia, 
and in South America the Ommexeca, which walks rather than 
springs. On the other hand, the Tetrix springs very well. A 
remarkable feature about them is their thorax, which is prolonged 
into a point, and covers the whole body. They are small insects 
of gay and brilliant colours, and generally remain on the leaves 
of low plants, and escape easily from the hand that tries to catch 
them. The Tetrix subulata, of a brownish colour, is common 
during spring, in the environs of Paris, in the woods, and in dry 
and arid fields. The Pnewmore are very strange insects. The 
males have a very prominent abdomen, which resembles a bladder 
filled with air; and their wings are very much developed. The 
females have the abdomen of the ordinary shape; their wings are 
very short, or even quite rudimentary. The former producé a 
sharp stridulation, by rubbing their hind-legs against a row of 
small tubercules, which are to be seen on each side of the abdomen. 
The sound is rendered still more penetrating by the vesiculous or 
bladder-like abdomen, the skin of which is stretched as. tight as 
adrum. The Pneumore inhabit the South of Africa, as also do 
the Truxales, a few varieties of which, however, are to be met 
with in Spain, Sicily, and the South of France. 
We will pass in silence over a great number of other less in- 
teresting species of Orthoptera. Those which we have described 
suffice to justify us in what we said above, namely, that this order 
contains insects of the strangest and most anomalous forms. 
