82 Indian Museum Notes. [ Yol. HI. 



imitation of the conditions that have been shown to be favourable to 

 e<^o>-laying, but the insects seemed to be too sickly to d\g holes in the 

 ground and simply deposited them on the surface. Some of the locusts 

 lived on. after laying their eggs, through a great part of April, but by 

 the 4th of May they were all found to have died, while the eggs they 

 had laid dried up, and came to nothing. Very much the same expe- 

 rience is detailed by Colonel Powlett, Resident, Western Rajputana 

 States, who writes in a report, dated 24th April 1891, received from the 

 Agent to the Governor-General, Rajputana, through the Government of 

 India : — 



" At and about Jodhpore mosi of the young brood of locusts appeared early in 

 August. When this brood got wings in September, I civught some hundreds and put 

 them in cages and had them regularly fed ; they died off, and by February there were 

 less than twenty left, but two pairs of these were observed to copulate. On the 24th 

 and 25th February two females laid eggs. They were not healthy masses of eggs, and 

 the females did not succeed in depositing them under the soil placed in the cages, nor 

 have tliey hatched. But it is evidently ditficult to keep locusts healthy in cages, 

 and the oviposits being poor is not wondered at. It would appear, however, to be 

 proved that the common locusts of Northern India can copulate and lay eggs six or 

 seven months after birth, and that in all probability the eggs lately laid in the Punjab 

 were those of insects hatched last August. The locusts which copulated round Jodhpore 

 last July were of a bright yellow; the survivors of their offspring, which were pink 

 when put into the cages in September, were in February a dirty purple colour, and to 

 the best of my recollection that was the colour of the locusts the eggs of which 

 many years ago I helped to destroy during the month of March in the Punjab." 



The habitual disappearance of locusts throughout the greater portion 

 of the winter months in North-Western India is explained by the fact that 

 they require little or no food during this period, and probably hybernate 

 in a dormant condition. On 28t,h February 1891 Mr. J. Cleghorn wrote 

 that locusts had been hybernating without food in a cage kept in his house 

 in Peshin, Baluchistan, since the 15th September 1890, though he had 

 found that similar insects in the summer required to be fed constantly to 

 keep them alive. 



There is little to add to what has already been recorded upon the 

 Measures adopted against subject of the methods adopted in Sghtiug tlie 

 the locusts. locusts, but it may be useful to notice what 



was actually done during the year 1891 in carrying on the campaign 

 in different districts. The reports which have been received upon this sub- 

 ject are very fragmentary, but the measures they describe are probably 

 typical of what went on over the greater portion of the areas invaded.(^) 



(^) The following notices are mostly taken from -a report by the Director of Land Re- 

 cords and Agriculture, Punjab, supplemented by the information collecti'd from crop and 

 other reports sent to the Museum. 



