350 THE UNIVERSE. 



CHAPTEE IV. 



MIGRATIONS OF INSECTS. 



The greatest depredators on our globe are not the im- 

 posing bisons, the roar of Avhich shakes the desert, nor the 

 winged invaders which devastate our forests; they are the 

 infinitely little insects which the wrath of Jehovah disperses 

 over the earth to make manifest his power. 



Such is the wandering locust {Gri/llus migratorius), one 

 of the most terrible scourges of agriculture. In Africa 

 and Asia its innumerable cohorts appear in such masses, 

 that when they are seen advancing at a distance, they 

 resemble immense black clouds which intercept the solar 

 rays and plunge the country in the most profound dark- 

 ness. A fonuidable sound, which Forskal compares to 

 that of a cataract, announces the arrival of these redoubt- 

 able Orthoptera. When they alight upon the ground they 

 form a living sheet more than a foot thick, and when, worn 

 out by fatigue, they pile themselves uj^on the trees, the 

 branches bend and break under their weight. The entire 

 track of these devouring insects seems to have been wasted 

 by a fire; not a trace of verdure is seen on it. 



Human skill is inadequate to exorcise this pest. In 

 vain do armies and peoples rise en masse to arrest these 

 terrible devastators. They fail. And if death overtake 

 these famished guests, their corpses, heaped up on the soil, 



