ee 
ORTHOPTERA. 303 
locusts (Arbeth) come over the whole land of Egypt, as the eighth 
plague, destined to intimidate Pharaoh, who had rebelled against 
Him. . These insects arrived, brought by an east wind, and covered 
the surface of the country to such a degree that the air was 
darkened by them.* 
They ate up all the herbs of the field and all the fruit of the 
trees which the hail (the seventh plague) had left. A west wind 
swept them away again, when Pharaoh had at last promised to 
allow the children of Israel to depart. 
Pliny relates that in many places in Greece a law obliged the 
inhabitants to wage war against the locusts three times a year; 
that is to say, in their three states of egg, larva, and adult. In 
the isle of Lemnos, the citizens had to pay as taxes so many 
measures of locusts. In the year 170 before our era, they devas- 
tated the environs of Capua. In the year of our Lord 181, 
they committed great ravages in the north of Italy and in Gaul. 
In 1690 locusts arrived in Poland and Lithuania by three 
different ways, and, as it were, in three different bodies. “ They 
were to be found in certain places where they had died,” writes 
the Abbé Ussaris, an eye-witness, ‘lying on one another in 
| heaps of four feet in height. Those which were alive perched 
upon the trees, bending their branches to the ground, so great 
) was their number. The people thought that they had Hebrew 
letters on their wings. A rabbi professed to be able to read on 
them words which signified God’s wrath. The rains killed these 
insects: they infected the air, and the cattle, which eat them in 
the grass, died immediately.” 
In 1749, locusts stopped the army of Charles XII., King of 
Sweden, as it was retreating from Bessarabia, on its defeat at 
| Pultawa. The king thought that he was assailed by a hailstorm, 
* “And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord 
brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night; and when it 
was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And the locusts went up over all 
the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt ;.very grievous were they ; 
before them were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. For 
they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened ; and they 
did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left ; 
| and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, 
through all the land of Egypt.’’—Exod, x. 183—16. 

