INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 131 
a little singular how they could have supported themselves in the air so 
long, as there was no land to the north-west for several thousand miles. 
Two days afterwards, the weather being moderate, the brig sailed through 
swarms of them floating dead upon the waters.” 
With respect to the course which the locusts pursue, Hasselquist has 
observed that they migrate in a direct meridian line from south to north, 
passing from the deserts of Arabia, which is the great cradle of them, to 
Palestine, Syria, Caramania, Natolia, Bithynia, Constantinople, Poland, 
&c,—they never turn either to the east or to the west.” But this must be 
a mistaken notion ; for those which Major Moor saw at Poonah, of which 
[have given an account aboye®, must have come due east. Mr. Jackson 
also noticed their course north of the line to be towards the south*; and 
Sparrman tells us that those south of the line migrate in the same 
direction.® 
I fear that Hasselquist’s question,—Could they not by fright, or some 
other method, be turned from their dreadful course, to steer for some 
river, and by that means be obliged to destroy themselves ?®—must be 
answered in the negative. All such experiments, it is to be apprehended, 
would be about as effectual as sending an army, with all the apparatus of 
war, to take the field against them, as this author says is done in Syria, 
where the Bashaw of Tripoli once raised a force of 4000 soldiers to fight 
the locusts, and yery summarily ordered all to be hanged who, thinking it 
beneath them to waste their valour upon such pigmy foes, refused to join 
the party.” Tam, &c. 
1 Ann. Nat. Hist. vi. 527. The authenticity of the above accounts is fully proved 
by a fact mentioned by Mr. Darwin,—that a large grasshopper (Aecrydium) flew on 
board the Beagle when she was to windward of the corr de Verd Islands, and when 
the nearest point of land, not directly opposed to the trade-wind, was Cape Blanco, 
on the west of Africa, 870 miles distant. (Journal in Voyages of the Adventure and 
Beagle, p. 186.) 
2 Voyage to the Levant, p. 446, 447. 5 See p, 127. 
4 Travels, 54. 5 Travels, i. 866. 
6 Travels 455. : 7 Travels, 447. 
