COLEOPTERA. 447 
environs of Blois fourteen thousand cockchafers were picked up by 
children in a few days. At Fontainebleau they could have gathered 
as many in a certain year in as many hours. Sometimes they 
congregate in swarms, like locusts, and migrate from one 
locality to another, when they lay waste everything. To present 
an idea of the prodigious extent to which cockchafers increase 
under certain circumstances, we will give a few statistics :— 
In 1574, these insects were so abundant in England that they 
stopped many mills on the Severn. In 1688, in the county of 
Galway, in Ireland, they formed such a black cloud that the sky 
was darkened for the distance of a league, and the country people 
had great difficulty in making their hay in the places where they 
alighted. They destroyed the whole of the vegetation in such a 
way that the landscape assumed the desolate appearance of winter. 
Their voracious jaws made a noise which may be compared to that 
produced by the sawing of a large piece of wood: and in the 
evening the buzzing of their wings resembled the distant rolling 
of drums. The unfortunate Irish were reduced to the necessity of 
cooking their invaders, and, for the want of any other food, of 
eating them. In 1804, immense swarms of cockchafers, pre- 
cipitated by a violent wind into the Lake of Zurich, formed on 
the shore a thick bank of bodies heaped up one on the other, 
the putrid exhalations from which poisoned the atmosphere. On 
May 18, 1832, at nine o’clock in the evening, a legion of cock- 
chafers assailed a diligence on the road from Gournay to Gisors, 
just as it was leaving the village of Talmontiers; the horses, 
blinded and terrified, refused to advance, and the driver was 
obliged to return as far as the village, to wait till this new sort 
of hail-storm was over. M. Mulsant, in his ‘‘ Monographie des 
Lamellicornes de la France,” relates that in May, 1841, clouds 
of cockchafers traversed the Sadne, from the south-east in the 
direction of the north-west, and settled in the vineyards of the 
Maconnais. The streets of the town of Macon were so full of 
them that they were shovelled up with spades. At certain hours, 
one could not pass over the bridge unless one whirled a stick 
rapidly round and round, to protect oneself against their touch. 
The coupling takes place towards the end of May, after which 
the males die; the females only surviving them for the time 
