Dragon- Fly Storms. 133 



wind spends its force. This is particularly the 

 case when the wind blows up at a late hour of the 

 day ; then, on the following morning, the dragon- 

 flies are seen clustering to the foliage in such 

 numbers that many trees are covered with them, a 

 large tree often appearing as if hung with curtains 

 of some brown glistening material, too thick to 

 show the green leaves beneath. 



In Patagonia, where the phenomenon, of dragon-fly 

 storms is also known, an Englishman residing at the 

 Rio Negro I'elated to me the following occurrence 

 which he witnessed there. A race meeting was 

 being held near the town of El Carmen, on a high 

 exposed piece of ground, when, shortly before sun- 

 set, a violent pampero wind came up, laden with 

 dense dust-clouds. A few moments before the 

 storm broke, the air all at once became obscured 

 with a prodigious cloud of dragon-flies. About a 

 hundred men, most of them on horseback, were 

 congregated on the course at the time, and the in- 

 sects, instead of rushing by in their usual way, 

 settled on the people in such quantities that men 

 and horses were quickly covered with clinging 

 masses of them. My informant said — and this 

 agrees with my own observation — that he was 

 greatly impressed by the appearance of terror shown 

 by the insects ; they clung to him as if for dear life, 

 so that he had the greatest difficulty in ridding 

 himself of them. 



Weissenborn, in Loudon's Magazine of Natural 

 History (N. S. vol. iii.) describes a great migration 

 of dragon-flies which he witnessed in Germany in 

 1839, and also mentions a similar phenomenon 



