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EDITOKIAL GLEANINGS. 



San Pete County, Utah, offers a rich market for Grasshoppers, 

 for, as the ' New York Times ' observes, men, women, and children 

 are engaged from daylight until dark in collecting the pests and 

 shipping them to the cities. The market price is one dollar a bushel, 

 and there seems to be no limit to either the supply or demand. 

 Millions of the insects darken the sun and hover over the gardens and 

 fields, threatening destruction to everything in their pathway. An 

 area comprising 1,800 square miles, in the centre of the richest agri- 

 cultural section of Utah, is infested by the Grasshoppers. Sections 

 of soil under microscopic test show seventy- six Grasshopper eggs 

 deposited in a piece only two inches square. This is the situation in 

 an entire mountain-walled valley, including fifteen prosperous towns, 

 having a combined population of 20,000 people. The insects are 

 everywhere that they can crawl or fly, and have destroyed the wheat 

 and oat fields, and will soon strip the grasses and trees of every sign 

 of vegetation. The average daily harvest of men and women ranges 

 about thirty bushels of the insects. These are held in "gunny sacks," 

 and measured or guessed as to quantity, and the money paid without 

 a murmur. Business men and farmers have contributed to a fund for 

 the extermination of the Grasshoppers, and have all the people they 

 can secure at work picking them from the grain fields. When a 

 collection of sacks is made the mass is burned on the streets amid the 

 shouts of young and old gathered about the bonfires. — St. James's 

 Gazette. 



The little Scottish town of Cromarty has recently celebrated the 

 centenary of the birth of Hugh Miller, son of a Cromarty fisherman, 

 by early profession himself a stone-mason. The observation he had 

 exercised as a stone-mason, and the attention which he had since 

 devoted to geological studies, were embodied in 1841 in ' The Old Bed 

 Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field,' a book which may fairly 

 be said to have made a deep impression in both the scientific and 

 literary worlds. Written in a stately, lucid style, with vivid passages 

 which proved an eye-to-eye acquaintance with his subject, its con- 



