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450 THE INSECT WORLD. 
anvirons of Blois fourteen thousand cockchafers were picked up by | 
children in a few days. At Fontainebleau they could have eathered 
as many in a certain year in as many hours. Sometimes they 
congregate im swarms like locusts, and migrate from one 
locality to another, when they lay waste everything. To present | 
an idea of the prodigous extent to which cockchafers mcrease_ 
under certain circumstances, Wwe will give a few statistics :— 
In 1574, these insects were 80 abundant in England that they 
stopped many mills on the Severn. In 1688, in the county of 
Galway, in Ireland, they formed such a black cloud that the sky 
was darkened for the distance of a league, and the country people 
had great difficulty in making their hay in the places where they 
alighted. ‘They destroyed the whole of the vegetation in such a 
way that the landscape issumed the desolate appearance of winter. 
Their voracious jaws made a noise which may be compared to 
that produced by the sawing of a large piece of wood: and im 
the evening the buzzing of their wings resembled the distant 
rolling of drums. The unfortunate Irish were reduced to the 
necessity of cooking their ‘nvaders, and for the want of any other 
food, of eating them. In 1804, immense swarms of cockchafers, 
precipitated by a violent wind into the Lake of Zurich, formed on 
the shore a thick bank of bodies heaped up one on the other, 
the putrid exhalations from which poisoned the atmosphere. On 
May 18, 1882, at mine o’clock in the evening, a legion of cock- 
chafers assailed a diligence on the road from Gournay to Gisors, 
just as it was leaving the village of Talmontiers, the horses 
blinded and terrified, refused to advance, and the driver was 
obliged to return as far as the village, to wait till this new sor 
of hail-storm was over. M. Mulsant, in his ‘‘ Monographie det 
Lamellicornes de la France,’ relates that in-May; 1841, cloud) 
of cockchafers traversed the Sadne, from the south-east in the 
direction of the north-west, and settled in the vineyards of thr 
Maconnais. The streets of the town of Macon were so full o 
them that they were shovelled up with spades. At certain hours 
one could not pass over the bridge unless one whirled a stich 
rapidly round and round, to protect oneself against their touch. — 
The coupling takes place towards the end of May, afte! 
which the males die; the females only surviving them fo. 
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