ORTHOPTERA. 
1S1 
between the locusts and many of the other grasshoppers of this family. Grass¬ 
hoppers feed chiefly on the grasses of different kinds, including most of the 
cultivated grains; but locusts leave scarcely anything in the nature of vegetation 
untouched, when, as often happens, they invade a district where the ordinary 
herbs and grasses are insufficient to support their vast numbers. Trees and shrubs 
are then stripped bare of their leaves, and the bark and wood even are not spared. 
Pressed by hunger, locusts do not refrain from attacking plants which at ordinary 
times they seem to avoid. They frequently devour their own dead, and even 
carry their cannibalism so far as to kill and eat the newly-moulted and soft- 
skinned larvae. Different species of these destructive insects are found in ail 
the great regions of the world; though North Africa is, perhaps, the one which 
migratory locust OF south-east Europe {Pachytylus migratorius) and its LARVAE (nat. size). 
suffers most from their ravages. The locusts referred to in Scripture belonged in 
all probability for the most part to the species known as Schistocerca peregrina, 
which has its chief home in the Sahara and surrounding districts. 
Several other species are found in North Africa, and in South Africa Pachy¬ 
tylus migratorioid.es is one of the most widely distributed. Great swarms of 
locusts of this species have been seen at different times in recent years; one which 
passed over Pretoria in 1891 was estimated to be twenty-five miles long, one and 
a half broad, and half a mile in depth. It was probably to this species also those 
locusts belonged, of which Barrow, giving an account of their ravages in the year 
1797, states that the whole surface of the ground over an area of about two thou¬ 
sand square miles was literally covered with them; and that when driven into the 
sea by a north-west wind, they formed a bank on the shore three or four feet high 
and fifty miles long. Amongst European locusts, the best known is P. migratorius, 
