AGRICULTURE. 99 



T have given the above extracts at some risk of appearing 

 prolix, to an indifferent reader ; but it is quite impossible 

 bo interest those who have no mind to know. I wish to 

 impress it upon those who never saw a locust that such an animal 

 <loes exist; and upon those who have seen more than enough of 

 them, that their losses are not without precedent, but that for 

 hundreds and thousands of years locusts have ravaged the garden 

 spots of the world, — such as the fields of Capua, whose luxuriant 

 yields once ruined the armies of Hannibal, or Cyrenaic Barca, the 

 fabled seat of the Hesperian gardens. 



I have dwelt upon the European locust, not because they are 

 wY>rse'or as bad as in many other places, but because we live in 

 the Europe of North America; and the worst that has ever hap- 

 pened in any part of this country is only a repetition of what has 

 repeatedly been witnessed there. 



[ have striven to learn the exact localities where they have been, 

 and the countries from whence they came; for their origin and 

 what the conditions are that cause them at certain periods of time 

 to multiply so prodigiously are the great problems first to be 

 solved. 



If it be true that their natural breeding-place is among moun- 

 tains, highlands or plateaus, of course they must always be found 

 within striking distance of these places, and when they quit them, 

 whether it be by accident or from natural desire or instinct, they 

 do seem to affect the plains, the fertile valleys and broad level deltas 

 of rivers. Need I refer to the valley of the Nile } . Take the locali. 

 ties in Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Russia, already men- 

 tioned. 



The country from ihe Appennines to the sea, for a long distance 

 about Capua, is a plain, almost as flat as the Pontine marshes 

 nearer Rome. Speak of Lombardy, and it is always "the plains 

 of Lombardy, " and it is a plain, as its name implies. Cross the 

 Cottian Alps to the west of this, and we are in another locust 

 region, and another extensive plain, Languedoc and Provence, at 

 the mouths of the Rhone, a country that might pass for a section 

 of Africa. Hungary may be described as almost Avholly a plain, 

 sloping toward the Danube from the semicircular rim of moun- 

 tains on the north. Pass eastward through the "Iron Gates" of 

 the Danube and into Wallachia and Moldavia, Bessarabia and Bul- 

 garia, and we have another of the greatest river plains in Europe. 

 Podolia, in Russian Poland, that never made much of a figure in 

 any but a locust history, is for the most part a fertile level plain. 



