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304 THE INSECT WORLD. 
when a host of these insects beat violently against his army as it 
was passing through a defile, so that men and horses were blinded 
by this living hail, falling from a cloud which hid the sun. The 
arrival of the locusts had been announced by a whistling sound 
like that which precedes a tempest ; and the noise of their flight 
quite overpowered the noise made by the Black Sea. All the 
country round about was soon laid waste on their route. During 
the same year a great part of Europe was invaded by these pests, 
the newspapers of the day being full of accounts relating to this 
public calamity. In 1753 Portugal was attacked by them. This 
was the year of the earthquake of Lisbon, and all sorts of 
plagues seemed at this time to rage furiously in that unfortunate 
country. 
In 1780, in Transylvania, their ravages assumed such gigantic 
proportions that it was found necessary to call in the assistance of 
the army. Regiments of soldiers gathered them together and 
enclosed them in sacks. Fifteen hundred persons were employed 
in crushing, burying, and burning them; but, in spite of all this, 
their number did not seem to diminish ; but a cold wind, which 
fortunately sprang up, caused them to disappear. In the fol- 
lowing spring the plague broke out again, and every one turned 
out to fight against it. The locusts were swept with great 
brooms into ditches, in which they were then burnt; not, 
however, before they had ruined the whole country. Locusts 
showed themselves at the same time in the empire of Morocco, 
where they caused a fearful famine. ‘The poor were to be seen 
wandering on all sides digging up the roots of vegetables, and 
eagerly devouring camels’ dung, in hopes of finding in it a few 
undigested grains of barley. 
Barrow and Levaillant, in their travels through Central Africa, 
speak of simuar calamities having happened many times between 
1784 and 1797. They add that the surface of the rivers was then 
hidden by the bodies of the locusts, which covered the whole 
country. 3 
According to Jackson, in 1739 they covered the whole sur- 
face of the ground from Tangiers to Mogador. All the region 
near to the Sahara was ravaged, whilst on the other side of the 
river El Klos there was not one of these insects. When the wind 


