Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 51, Vol. I, December 20, 1884

No. 51.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1884.
BY A DWELLER IN THE EAST.
Everybody who has read anything about the East must be acquainted with the plague of locusts. I distinctly remember that when a small boy I was more impressed by the accounts of the enormous extent of their flocks than with anything else my books could tell me. There was to me something appalling, and at the same time attractive, in the swarms stretching for miles, which obscured the sun, and devoured everything green wherever they settled. It is difficult, if not impossible, for any one brought up in our temperate regions to realise such a state of things. We hear, to be sure, of damage done to crops at home; just now, it is sparrows; not very long since it was game; next year it may be something else; but in all these cases it is simply damage—perhaps one per cent., or five per cent., or ten per cent. But with locusts it means not damage, but destruction, or, better still, annihilation of the crop. Fancy an English farmer turning out after breakfast and admiring his six-acre field of wheat, deliciously green, about two feet high. Fancy him, too, coming home to dinner at noon and seeing this same field as bare as his hand. This is no exaggeration, but a plain matter-of-fact illustration of what may be seen any spring where these abominable insects abound. Once seen, it can never be forgotten.
I have had my recollection of these creatures and their ways revived by a parliamentary paper entitled, ‘Report of the Locust Campaign of 1884, by Mr S. Brown, Government Engineer, Cyprus.’ It gives the results of the measures employed to stay the plague to which the island has for ages been subject; and so far it is satisfactory enough. The locusts have been put down, and for most people that is the chief point. I notice that the Times has devoted about half a column to the paper, but has contented itself with simply copying the salient points, the writer evidently knowing nothing of the subject. The paper itself presupposes a knowledge of a certain nature, which no one except those who are acquainted with the district can be expected to possess. I venture, therefore, to supply the information necessary to a thorough understanding of the subject.