strength and breadth. They are turned outwards, like their namesake's, the mole, to whose habits

they are very analogous, and enable the insects when sought for to burrow with very great rapidity, leaving a ridge in the surface as they work; but they do not form hillocks as the mole. These animals prefer for their haunts moist meadows, also the sides of quiet and running water, and swampy

wet soil.

Their habitations are surrounded with many winding passages, which generally lead to a kind

of chamber or nursery, marvellously formed by the parent for the preservation of her offspring. This

chamber is about the size of a small egg, though not quite so oval, neatly smoothed and rounded, and within are deposited more than a hundred eggs of a dirty yellow colour. In a month, these give birth to the young, which resemble the parent in every thing but the wings, except that at first they are white, soft, and very small. The careful parent, it is said, not only protects her eggs by forming the oval chamber for them, but surrounds it with a regular defence of ditches and ramparts, about which she herself keeps anxious watch. A black groundbeetle is the enemy from which she has most to dread, but for which the maternal instinct is often more than a match; for, as it endeavours to creep into the chamber, the mole cricket seizes it, and bites it asunder. "In the middle of April," says White, "at the close of day, these animals begin to solace themselves by a low, dull, jarring note, continued for a long time without interruption, and not unlike the chattering of the goatsucker, but more inward." When the mole crickets fly, they move in rising and falling curves, somewhat like the first species. They are supposed by some persons to be luminous, and that these animals are probably the ignis-fatuus, or jack-o'-lantern.

CHAPTER XII.

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE LOCUST, ETC.

The Idea entertained by the Ancients, by the Arabs-The supposed Meaning of the Letters on their Wings, &c.-Their Food--Ravages-The Description given by Joel-The Beneficial Results from the Locusts, used as Food-Niebuhr's Account- Their Ravages in Barbary, in Transylvania, in Spain-Size of the largest Species-Ravages in Mahratta, and in Africa-The Wart-eating Locust-Prickly Grasshopper-On the Metamorphoses of this kind of Insects.

THE history of the locust is indeed a series of the greatest calamities which human nature has suffered. Kingdoms have been depopulated. In all ages and times, these insects have so deeply impressed the

imagination, that all people have looked on them with superstitious horror. Their devastations have entered into the history of nations, and their effigies have been perpetuated in coins, like those of other conquerors of the earth.

We are the army of the great God, and we lay ninety-and-nine eggs; were the hundredth put forth, the world would be ours-such is the speech the

Arabs put into the mouth of the locust. The Mohammedans say, that after God had created man from clay, of that which was left he made the locust. The feeling which the Arabs entertain of this insect is well shown in the description they give of its pedigree and person. It has the head of the horse, the horns of the stag, the eye of the elephant, the neck of the ox, the breast of the lion, the body of the scorpion, the hip of the camel, the legs of the stork, the wings of the eagle, and the tail of the dragon.

The wings of some being spotted, were thought by many to be leaves from the book of fate, in which letters announcing the destiny of nations were to be read.

Much of this description is quite oriental, but such is the general resemblance to some of the animals mentioned, that in Germany one of its names is grass-horse, and in Italy it is still termed cavalletta. About its neck, too, the integuments have some resemblance to the trappings of a horse, though other species have the appearance of being hooded.

Paul Jetzote, professor of Greek literature at the Gymnasium of Stettin, wrote a work on the meaning of the three letters, which were, according to him, to be seen on the wings of those locusts which visited Silesia in 1712. These letters were B. E. S., and formed the initials of the Latin words "Bella Erunt Sæva," or "Babel Est Solitudo;" also the German words, "Bedeutet Erschreckliche Schlacten," portending frightful battles, "Bedeutet und Erfreuliche Siege," portending happy victories. There are Greek and Hebrew sentences, in which no doubt the professor showed as much learning, judgment, and spirit of prophecy, as in those already quoted.

Not content with the dreadful presence of this plague, the inhabitants of most countries took that opportunity of adding to their present misery by VOL. II.-P

prognosticating future evils. The direction of their flight pointed out the kingdom doomed to bow under the divine wrath. The colour of the insect designated the national uniform of such armies as were to go forth and conquer.

Aldovandus states, on the authority of Cruntz, that Tamerlane's army being infested by locusts, that chief looked on it as a warning from God, and desisted from his designs on Jerusalem.

But to turn from these idle tales to the real horrors of its history. The locust feeds on all green things, though the food is not the same with each kind. Some prefer the rankest and coarsest grass, and leave the finer untouched. They have been known to consume the straw with which the vines were bound to the poles of a vineyard, and pass over the shrub itself. But whatever they fall on they eat with voracity, and leave whole countries, which before were green, quite black, and as if burnt by fire. But though voracious, and though the plains on which they may have happened to alight may not be sufficient to supply the whole of their countless myriads, yet there is a semblance of subordination among them. They are not observed to scramble for the portion which a more fortunate neighbour may have alighted on, but each takes that which falls to his lot.

Pliny has given us many tales of the ferocity of these insects, and Aldrovandus has copied them. That they fall on the snake, and, seizing it by the neck, throttle it; and that one is a match for the serpent. That they consume animal as well as vegetable substances is improbable; they have been known, however, when several have been shut up together, to fall on, attack, and devour each other, in this respect imitating many species of herbivorous caterpillars.

Their numbers are so great that the sun is for hours eclipsed by a flight of these insects. A Ger