ORTHOPTERA. 311 
speaks of the natives of Ethiopia, who live on locusts, as dying 
eaten up by winged insects bred in their own bodies. 
It is difficult to explain the origin of such fables. Travellers 
who have visited Arabia agree in declaring that the locust is a 
most wholesome article of food ; that it is even fattening. At any 
rate, 1t is good food for cattle and poultry. The ancients employed 
locusts mm medicine. Dioscorides asserts that the thighs of the 
locust, reduced to powder, and mixed with the blood of the he- 
goat, is a cure for leprosy ; and mixed with wine, is a specific 
against the bite of the scorpion, &c. 
It remains for us to describe some other species of grasshoppers 
less destructive in their ravages than the Acrydium migratorium. 
In the deserts of Egypt is to be met with the great Eremobia, 
und in South America the Ommexa, which walks rather than 
springs. On the other hand, the Tetrix springs very well. A 
remarkable feature about them is their thorax, which is prolonged 
into a point, and covers the whole body. They are small insects 
of gay and brilliant colours, and generally remain on the leaves of 
low plants, and escape easily from the hand that tries to catch 
them. The Tetrix subulata, of a brownish colour, is common 
during spring, in the environs of Paris, in the woods, and in 
dry and arid fields. The Pnewmore are very strange insects. 
The males have a very prominent abdomen, which resembles a 
bladder, filled with air; and their wings are very much developed. 
The females have the abdomen of the ordinary shape ; their wings 
are very short, or even quite rudimentary. The former produce 
a sharp stridulation, by rubbing their hind-legs against a row of 
small tubercules, which are to be seen on each side of the abdomen. 
The sound is rendered still more penetrating by the vesiculous or 
bladder-lke abdomen, the skin of which is stretched as tight as 
adrum, The Prewmnore inhabit the South of Africa, as also do the 
Truxales, a few varieties of which, however, are to be met with 
in Spain, Sicily, and the South of France. 
We will pass in silence over a great number of other less in- 
teresting species of Orthoptera. Those which we have described 
suffice to justify us in what we said above, namely, that this order 
contains insects of the strangest and most anomalous forms. 

