Fig. 196.—Musical instruments of the locust: a, leg; b, c, teeth, enlarged.
The locusts (Acridiidæ) have short antennæ, large glassy eyes, and ears at the base of the abdomen. The female is provided with an appliance called the ovipositor, four sharp points with which the grasshopper digs holes in the ground; later these are used as a guide or funnel for introducing the eggs into the burrow. The mouth is supplied with parts adapted to biting. When a grasshopper (Fig. 195) is caught it exudes a peculiar fluid resembling molasses, a secretion of the salivary glands. The eggs are deposited in masses from sixty to one hundred. The young resemble the parent, but at first have no wings. The grasshopper in making its metamorphosis, or change from one stage to another, casts its skin in a manner calling to mind the crabs; in a word, it molts several times (Fig. 197). In accomplishing this, it often climbs a spear of grass and there shuffles out of its old skin and jumps away, leaving the hollow skin clinging to the grass.
Fig. 197.—A grasshopper and young at different stages: A, larva; B, pupa; C, adult.
At times they appear in vast numbers, and in clouds rise into the air, so that from a distance they might be taken for smoke or a tornado. This cloud is made up of starving locusts which devastate the countries they infest. They alight upon a wheat field, and an hour later hundreds of acres appear as though a fire had swept over the ground. Every spear of grass, every leaf, has been devoured by this insatiate throng, which can not be destroyed or even checked. In Africa swarms have been swept by the wind out over the ocean, to be washed in in such vast numbers that they formed a line fifty miles long and three or four feet high alongshore, creating an odor which drove people from that region. Jægar, the naturalist, rode through a swarm in Russia for four hundred miles where they were two feet deep. The entire country was devastated by this band of locusts, and tens of thousands of human beings were threatened with starvation. The government troops were ordered to the place and warfare declared against the locusts, the soldiers being armed with shovels instead of guns. A line of thirty thousand men moved slowly forward, covering the insects with earth or digging them under, while in various localities huge fires were built to burn the ground and destroy the eggs. Despite this, thirty thousand people starved to death, the direct result of their raids. Almost every portion of the world away from the poles has been threatened by these raiders. There are many references in the Bible to these insects, and their ravages have been carried on from the earliest times known to man. In America the Rocky Mountain locust is the most destructive, and many of the Western states have been ravaged by them.
"Onward they came, a dark, continuous cloud of congregated myriads, numberless.
The rushing of whose wings was as the sound of a broad river, headlong in its course.
Plunged from a mountain summit, or the roar of a wild ocean, as the autumn storm,