Variation in the Price and Supply of Wheat. 237 
parts of the islatul. They are frugal and temperate in their living; coarse 
bread, cheese, olives, and vegetables, forming the ordinary food of the peasantry ; 
yet, owing to the abundance and cheapness of wine, inebriety is not uncommon 
amongst them. Brigandage, burglaries, and assassinations are so rare as to be 
almost unknown in Cyprus. Political agitation, or opposition on the part of 
the people to the constituted authority, is equally unknown. 
The worst enemy, however, among the animal creation which Cyprus lias 
to contend with, and the most injurious to its agricultural prosperity, is the 
locust. Notices are tbund in writers of the fifteenth century of the fearful 
depredations of this insect. It has been imagined that it has been at different 
times borne by the winds from Caramania or Syria, and thus carried across 
the sea to Cyprus ; it has been again thought that it may have been intro- 
duced b^' ships bringing cargoes of grain. It seems, however, to be indigenous ; 
and so wonderfully prolific is it, that unless active measures are taken to 
extirpate it, it increases in a few years so rapidly, and in such quantities, as 
to swarm in myriads upon the fiice of the country to which they are confined 
and shut in by the sea. When the wind, however, is strong from the land at 
the time they approach the coast in their flight, they are carried out to sea, and 
perish in vast quantities. In the month of April the country is alive with 
locusts ; they eat up every green thing, and leave literally a desert behind 
them. In August they deposit their eggs and shortly after die. llie spots 
where the eggs are deposited are easily discovered by a shin}' viscous matter 
with which they cover and soften the earth when about to deposit them. The 
male is said to be much more numerous than the female. Each female is said 
to lay two or tven three eggs, each of which produces on an average at least 
thirty locusts, the egg being in fact an agglomeration of small eggs in one 
oblong mass about the size of a fine seed, in which the eggs are disposed close 
together like seed in a pod. With care and perseverance Cj'prus might be 
freed of this plague. By a systematic and continued destruction of the 
insect and its eggs it would almost disappear in the course of three or four 
years. The attempt was made by Osman Pasha in 1855-56, and proved very 
successful, but it was subsequently neglected, and the consequence was that, 
although Cyprus enjoyed a few years' freedom from them, yet they gradually 
increased in numbers till, in 1861, the spring crops suffered fearfully from their 
ravages. 
1867. — The growing of cotton continues in spite of the fall in price. Four- 
fifths of the seed sown is indigenous ; the larger and more enterprising farmers 
alone sow American seed. Grain is exported to Syria. Locust-beans, or 
carobs, were formerly in demand in England, but that demand has ceased, and 
the produce of the island is mainly sent to Russia. The madder root, another 
impoi tant staple production of Cyprus, is also less in demand than formerly, 
and the price of this dye is diminishing. It is supplanted by cotton. 
A large collection of locusts' eggs in 1864, and the unusual wetness of the 
spring of 1865, saved the island from their ravages. Afterwards the scarcity 
of locusts caused the people to neglect the search for their eggs during August 
and September, a neglect attended by the usual results. 
Ehodes. 
Repokt by Consul Callajtdrer for 1862. — Agriculture is in a most 
backward state, being carried on in a most primitive manner and with th c 
rudest implements. 
The almost entire destruction of the forests by fire has been a severe blow to 
the fertility of the island. The soil is no longer manured or kept moist by the 
fallen leaves, whilst the rain, tinding no obstacle from the roots of the trees, 
makes deep furrows, can-ying away the soil and disfiguring the face of the 
country. 
