CHAPTER V. 



HABITS, AND POWER FOR INJURY. 



ITS FLIGHT AND RAVAGES. 



The voracity of these insects can hardly be imagined by 

 those who have not witnessed them, in solid phalanx, 

 falling upon a cornfield and converting, in a few hours, 

 the green and promising acres into a desolate stretch of 

 bare, spindling stalks and stubs. Covering each hill by 

 hundreds ; scrambling from row to row like a lot of young 

 famished pigs let out to their trough ; insignificant indi- 

 vidually, but mighty collectively — they sweep clean a field 

 quicker than would a whole herd of hungry steers. Im- 

 agine hundreds of square miles covered with such a 

 ravenous horde, and one can get some realization of the 

 picture presented in many parts of the country west of 

 the Mississippi during years of locust invasion. 



Their flight may be likened to an immense snow storm, 

 extending from the ground to a height at which our visual 

 organs perceive them only as minute, darting scintilla- 

 tions — leaving the imagination to picture them indefinite 

 distances beyond. " When on the highest peaks of the 

 snowy range, fourteen or fifteen thousand feet above the 

 sea, I have seen them filling the air as much higher as 

 they could be distinguished with a good field glass."* It 

 is a vast cloud of animated specks, glittering against the 



* Wm. N. Byera, Am. Entomologist , I, p. 94. 



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