57 
barked my rig tree : he hath made it clean hare and cast it away ; the branches 
thereof are made -white. * * * The field is wasted, the land mourneth. 
* * * Be ye ashamed, O, ye husbandmen; howl, O, ye vinedressers, for the 
wheat and for the barley, because the harvest of the held is perished. 
In 1881, Dr. Hagen published, in the columns of the Xew Yorker 
Belletristisches Journal (August 16), an interesting article entitled 
'•Heusehrecken-Kominissionen im Mittelalter und heute. " in which he 
showed that grasshopper invasions have taken place since time imme- 
morial, and that man's efforts to combat them have always ended in 
his discomfiture. It is not surprising, therefore, says Dr. Hagen, that 
the helpless multitude called on the intervention of the law and of God 
to deliver them from such pests; and the legislators on one side and the 
priests on the other were forced to carry out the will of the people. 
But since written laws and legislative decrees against elemental plagues 
would have been ridiculous without a surrounding of imposing, legally 
regulated forms, the development of these formalities gradually reached 
a high degree of perfection. Legislation for defense against injurious 
annual* reached its highest development in the Middle Ages. Legal 
procedures against all sorts of noxious animals were frequent, and the 
famous Burgundian legal light. Bartholonneus Chassameus, wrote a book 
setting forth the rules according to which a suit against grasshoppers 
should be entered. After a court had been called together by written 
request, a judge was appointed and two lawyers were elected, one to 
plead the cause of the people and one the cause of the accused grass- 
hoppers. The former commenced by formulating the charge, and con- 
cluded by requesting that the grasshoppers be burned. The defend- 
ant's lawyer replied that such a request was illegal before the grasshop- 
pers had been requested in due form to leave the country. When, how- 
ever, they had not left the country after a stated term, they could be 
excommunicated. Many years afterward, another jurist, Hiob Ludolph. 
wrote a pamphlet antagonizing Chassanaeus' work, setting forth the 
lamentable legal ignorance displayed by the latter. The accused grass- 
hoppers, said Ludolph, must be summoned four times before the court, 
and if they do not appear, then they should be dragged by force before 
the court. Then only can the suit proceed. Other interested parties, 
however, shall be heard, namely, the birds that feed on the grasshop- 
pers. Further, it would be a great injustice to banish the grasshoppers 
into adjacent territories. Finally, the code proposed by Chassameus 
can never be brought into accordance with the laws and rules of the 
Church, because there is absolutely nothing in those laws about suits 
against grasshoppers. 
Several suits against injurious insects were brought before the 
courts, and the rulings have been preserved. In one case (1479) a suit 
was brought against injurious worms, apparently cutworms, in the 
canton of Berne, Switzerland. The worms, although ably defended, 
lost the suit, and were excommunicated by the archbishop and banished. 
Regarding the effect of this awful punishment, the chronicler who relates 
