RAVAGES OF LOCUSTS IN CENTRAL AMERICA. 461 



Masses sung for the averting of that Plagne. In Mixco most of the idols were carryed 

 to the field, especially the pictures of our Lady, and that of St. Nicolas Tolentine, in 

 ■whose name the Church of Rome doth use to blesse little Breads and Wafers with the 

 Saint stamped upon them ; which they think are able to defend them from Agues, 

 Plague, Pestilence, Contagion, or any other great and immanent danger. There was 

 scarce any Spanish Husbandman who in this occasion came not from the Valley to the 

 Town of Mixco with his offering to this Saint, and who made not a vow to have a 

 Masse sung unto Saint Mchol as ; they all brought breads to be blessed, and carryed 

 them back to their Farmes, some casting them into their Corn, some burying them in 

 their hedges and fences, strongly trusting in Saint Nicolas, that his bread would have 

 power to keep the Locust out of their fields ; and so at the last those simple, ignorant 

 and blinded soules, when they saw the Locusts departed and their Corn safe, cried out 

 to our Lady some, others to Saint Nicolas, Milagro, a Miracle, judging the Saint worthy 

 of praise more than God, and performing to him their vows of Masses, which in their 

 fear and trouble they had vowed, by which erroneous and Idolatrous devotion of theirs 

 I got that year many more Crowns than what before I have numbred from the Sodalities. 

 The next year following, all that Countrey was generally infected with a kind of con- 

 tagious sicknesse. almost as infections as the Plague, which they call Tabardillo, and was 

 a Feaver in the very inward parts and bowels, which scarce continued to the seventh 

 day, but commonly took them away from the world to a grave the third or fifth day. 

 The filthy smell and stench which came from them, which lay sick of this disease, was 

 enough to infect the rest of the house, and all that came to see them. It rotted their 

 very mouths and tongues, and made them as black as a coal before they died. Very few 

 Spaniards were infected with this Contagion ; but the Indians generally were taken 

 with it. It was reported to have begun aibout Mexico, and to have spread from Town 

 to Town, till it came to Guatemala, and went on forwards ; and so likewise did the 

 Locusts the year before, marching as it were from Mexico over all the Countrey. — ^pp. 

 163, 164. 



The date of this invasion, as near as we can ascertain from the few 

 dates given by the author, was apparently either in 1633 or 1634. 



Clavigero (according to A. S. Taylor) witnessed locust invasions in 

 1738 or 1739 upon the coasts of Xicayan, in Oaxaca. Afterward a 

 famine occurred in Yucatan. 



In Wells's Explorations in Honduras, published in New York in 1857, 

 including original observations in the elevated mesas and valleys of 

 Eastern Honduras, the author remarks : 



The civil war, in 1853 and 1854, between Honduras and Guatemala, had paralyzed 

 every branch of trade, and the distress thus caused was increased by the scourge of 

 locusts passing in vast clouds over Central America, sweeping away, as by a conflagra- 

 tion, every green thing, and leaving famine and desolation in their path. The ravages 

 of the locusts in late years (consuming whole crops of a night) have combined with 

 war, decay of mining enterprises, and political changes to reduce the population of 

 Juticalpa from 8,000 to 4,000 souls.sa 



Eegarding the injuries caused by a Guatemalan locust, we quote the 

 following account from the Hon. E. G. Squier's Honduras j Descrip- 

 tive, Historical, and Statistical, 1870: 



The insect, however, which is most dreaded in Honduras, or, indeed, in all Central 

 America, is the langosta or cliapuHn, a species of grasshoppers or locust, which at inter- 

 vals afflicts the entire country, passing from one end to the other in vast columns of 

 many millions, literally darkening the air and destroying every green thing in their 

 course. I once rode t hrough one of these columns, which was fully ten miles in width. 

 ^Eeceived from the Smithsonian Institution. 



