16 



ard, of August 19, 1876, entitled "Locust Flights:" ft is there 

 stated that 



"The locusts which hatched in Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, in an area 

 of 250 miles from east to west, and 300 miles from north to south, took flight 

 in June, and invariably went northwest, and fell in innumerable swarms 

 upon the regions of British America, adjoining Forts Pelly, Carlton and El- 

 lis, covering an area as large as that they vacated on the Missouri River. 

 They were reinforced by the retiring column from Manitoba, and it seemed 

 to be hoping against hope that the new swarms of 187(5 would not again de- 

 scend upon the settlements in the Red River valley. Intelligence was re- 

 ceded here that the insects took flight from the vicinity of Fort Pelly on 

 the 10th of July, and then followed a fortnight of intense suspense." 



There is of course in all this a failure to connect by any direct 

 chain of continued observations the swarms that left the Mississippi 

 valley in 1875 and those which finally disappeared in the region 

 of the monntains and in British America; still less is it shown 

 that those swarms were the parents of those which are known to 

 have hatched in the same regions in 1876, or even that those 

 which are known to have hatched there were those which descended 

 upon the lower country in July and August. But there is at 

 least a strong series of probabilities. 



A great deal has been said within the past two years about the 

 practical help which the general government may perhaps rind 

 itself able to extend to the people of the Mississippi valley by 

 attacking the locust in its native breeding-places, and it has been 

 considered possible that some means might eventually be discovered 

 of preventing or at least mitigating such inroads as that which 

 has just ended. But if the events of 1875 and 1876 have any such 

 connection as is claimed for them in the preceding paragraph, if 

 the more northern and western breeding-grounds of the locust 

 are recruited from the lower cultivated regions in alternate years, 

 the problem of how to give practical help to the farmer will be 

 greatly simplified. It would be hard to imagine a method of ex- 

 tirpating the swarms or the eggs of a hurrying insect from an 

 extended area, or perhaps several such areas, of mountains and des- 

 erts, the resort of wild beasts and savages, where only armed bands 

 can maintain a foothold; and on the other hand it would be hard 

 for the government to find a time better fitted to begin the exter- 

 mination of the locust than when the mountain region must be 

 measurably depleted of its stock, nor a place better situated to the 

 warfare than a region where, with any fair assurance of conquer- 

 ing a peace, every inhabitant stands ready to do battle. 



