Dragon-Fly Storms, 
133 
wind spends its force. This is particularly the 
case when the wind blows up at a late hour of the 
day ; then^ on the following morning, the dragon- 
flies are seen clustering to the foliage in such 
numbers that many trees are covered with them, a 
large tree often appearing as if hung with curtains 
of some brown glistening material, too thick to 
show the green leaves beneath. 
In Patagonia, where the phenomenon of dragon-fly 
storms is also known, an Englishman residing at the 
Rio Negro related to me the following occurrence 
which he witnessed there. A race meeting was 
being held near the town of El Carmen, on a high 
exposed piece of ground, when, shortly before sun- 
set, a violent pampero wind came up, laden with 
dense dust-clouds. A few moments before the 
storm broke, the air all at once became obscured 
with a prodigious cloud of dragon-flies. About a 
hundred men, most of them on horseback, were 
congregated on the course at the time, and the in- 
sects, instead of rushing by in their usual way, 
settled on the people in such quantities that men 
and horses were quickly covered with clinging 
masses of them. My informant said — and this 
agrees with my own observation — that he was 
greatly impressed by the appearance of terror shown 
by the insects ; they clung to him as if for dear life, 
so that he had the greatest difficulty in ridding 
himself of them. 
Weissenborn, in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural 
History (N. S. vol. hi.) describes a great migration 
of dragon-flies which he witnessed in Germany in 
1839, and also mentions a similar phenomenon 
