“The Jews were allowed to eat them; and indeed when sprinkled with salt, and fried, they are not unlike in taste to our fresh-water cray-fish.”
“The Acridophagi[22], no doubt, were fond of eating them; in so much as they received their name from thence.”—He further adds—“The ακριδες, which St. John the Baptist fed upon in the wilderness, were properly locusts; and provided they appeared in the holy land during the spring, as they did in Barbary, it may be presumed that St. John entered upon his mission, and that the day of his shewing himself unto Israel (Luke i. 20) was at that season[23].”
Pliny has informed us that the locusts lay their eggs in autumn, which remain all the winter in the fissures of the earth, and come forth in the shape of locusts in the following spring; being, at first, without legs, and obliged to creep upon their wings. He tells us that they invariably choose tracts of level country in which to deposit their eggs, as being most full of crevices and fissures, and hence, if it chance to be a rainy season, the eggs never come to perfection; but, on the contrary, if the early part of the year should be dry, vast numbers of these insects may be expected in the summer ensuing.
Some writers (he adds) are of opinion that locusts breed twice in the year, and that they perish as often; the first supply dying in the heat of the summer, and the second immediately succeeding them. The mothers die as soon as they have brought forth their young, by reason of a small worm which breeds about the throat, and ultimately chokes them. The same author informs us that it is said there are locusts in India so much as three feet in length; and that the people of the country use their legs and thighs for saws, after they are properly dried! Pliny mentions, at the same time, their flight across the sea, over which they are carried by the wind, and where they usually fall, and perish in heaps; although this is not always of necessity the case, as early writers (he says) have remarked, because their wings are wet with the dew; for they have been known to pass over extensive tracts of sea, and will continue their flight for many days without rest. Locusts, he adds, are gifted with the power of foreseeing an approaching famine, and will take the precaution, on such an occasion, of transporting themselves into distant countries. He mentions also the noise which they make with their wings, and that they are sometimes mistaken for flights of strange birds: that they darken the sun in their flight, as if a heavy cloud had passed before it, and spread terror and consternation wherever they make their appearance; eating up everything which comes in their way, and even gnawing the very doors of the houses. Italy, on this writer’s authority, was so much infested with locusts from the opposite shores of Africa, that the people of Rome, alarmed at the idea of their producing a famine, had been often obliged to consult the books of the Sibyls, to discover by what means they might avert the wrath of the gods which they considered to be falling upon them. He tells us that in the Cyrenaica there existed a law, obliging the inhabitants, every third year, to wage a regular war with the locusts: on such occasions they were ordered to seek out their nests, to destroy the eggs and the young, and afterwards to proceed to extirpate such as had already come to maturity.
A heavy punishment, at the same time, was inflicted upon those who neglected this useful precaution, as though they had been guilty of an unpardonable crime against their sovereign and their country. In Lemnos, also, there was a measure established to regulate the quantity which each man should kill; and every person was obliged to give in his account to the magistrate, and to produce his measure full of dead locusts[24].
It may easily be conceived, from these relations, what consternation and dismay is excited among the inhabitants of a cultivated country by the appearance of a large swarm of locusts. The mischief, however, occasioned at Mesurata by those which we have mentioned above, was not by any means so great, we are happy to say, as might have been reasonably expected: and the Arabs of the place were soon as busily employed in eating their formidable invaders, as they had at first been in preserving their crops from experiencing a similar fate.
On the 2nd December, after repeated promises and disappointments, our camels at length arrived; and having made suitable presents to Shekh Belcazi and his son, we prepared to continue our journey. We had few difficulties to encounter in our dealings with the people of Mesurata; and we must confess that we found in their Shekh, notwithstanding his occasional evasions, more openness and honesty than are usually met with in the inhabitants of Mahometan countries.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]Υεται γαρ δηταυτα της Λιβυης.
[2]The saint and his tomb are thus mentioned by Captain Lyon:—