DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF LOCUSTS. 213 



fall upon a country like a plague or a blight. The farmer plows and 

 plants. He cultivates in hope, watching his growing grain, in graceful, 

 wave-like motion wafted to and fro by the warm summer winds. The 

 green begins to golden ; the harvest is at hand. Joy lightens his labor 

 as the fruit of past toil is about to be realized. The day breaks with a 

 smiling sun that sends his ripening rays through laden orchards and 

 promising fields. Kine and stock of every sort are sleek with plenty, 

 and all the earth seems glad. The day grows. Suddenly the sun's face 

 is darkened, and clouds obscure the sky. The joy of the morn gives 

 way to ominous fear. The day closes, and ravenous locust-swarms have 

 fallen upon the land. The morrow comes, and, ah ! what a change it 

 brings! The fertile land of promise and plenty has become a desolate 

 waste, and old Sol, even at his brightest, shines sadly through an atmos- 

 phere alive with myriads of glittering insects. The suffering in the 

 country invaded in 1874, and the dreadful desolation the following spring, 

 are sufficiently fresh in the minds of Western farmers, while the details 

 given in Chapter III convey a fair idea of the magnitude of the loss in- 

 flicted. 



Falling upon a cornfield, the insects convert in a few hours the green 

 and promising acres into a desolate stretch of bare, spindling stalks 

 and stubs. " Covering each hill by hundreds ; scrambling from row to 

 row like a lot of young famished pigs let out to their trough ; insignifi- 

 cant individually, but mighty coUectivel}', they sweep clean a field 

 quicker than would a whole herd of hungry steers. Imagine hundreds 

 of square miles covered with such a ravenous horde, and one can get 

 some realization of the picture presented in many parts of the country 

 west of the Mississippi during years of locust invasion. 



'' Their flight may be likened to an immense snow-storm, extending 

 from the ground to a height at which our visual organs perceive them 

 only as minute, darting scintillations, leaving the imagination to picture 

 them indefinite distances beyond. ' When on the highest peaks of the 

 Snowy Eange, fourteen or fitteen thousand feet above the sea, I have 

 seen them filling the air as much higher as they could be distinguished 

 with a good field-glass.' ^~ It is a vast cloud of a:.imated specks, glittering 

 against the sun. On the horizon they often appear as a dust tornado, 

 riding upon the wind like an ominous hail storm, eddying and whirling 

 about like the wild, dead leaves in an autumn storm, and finally sweeping 

 up to and past you, with a power that is irresistible. They move mainly 

 with the wind, and when there is no wind they whirl about in the air like 

 swarming bees. If a passing swarm suddenly meets with a change in 

 the atmosphere, ' such as the approach of a thunder-storm or gale of 

 wind, they come down precipitately, seeming to fold their wings, and fall 

 by the force of gravity, thousands being killed by the fall, if it is upon 

 stone or other hard surface.' "^^ 



*' Wm. X. Byers, Am. Entomologist, I,p. 94. 



28 ^m. N. Byers, Haydeu's Geol. Surv., 1670, p. 282. 



