According to General Daumas, locusts, fresh or preserved, are good food for both men and camels. They are eaten grilled or boiled, or prepared in the kous-koussou, after their legs, wings, and heads have been taken off. Sometimes they are dried in the sun, and reduced to powder, which is mixed with milk, and made into cakes with flour, dripping, or butter and salt. Camels are very fond of them; and they are given to them after having been dried, or roasted between two layers of ashes. Dried and salted, they are in Asia and in Africa an object of commerce. At Bagdad they sometimes cause the price of meat to fall. The taste of their flesh may be compared to that of the crab. Eastern nations have eaten locusts from time immemorial. The Greek comic poet, Aristophanes, tells us, in the "Acharnians," that the Greeks sold them in the markets. Moses allowed to the Jews four species, which are mentioned in Leviticus. St. John the Baptist, following the example of the prophet Amos, made them his food in the desert, where he found nothing but locusts and a little honey. The wholesomeness of this food was, however, disputed among the ancients. Strabo relates that there existed on the borders of the gulf of Arabia a people called by him Acridophagi, or Locust-eating people; but they all came to a miserable end. These people procured for themselves locusts by lighting great fires, when the equinoctial winds brought these hosts. Blinded and suffocated by the smoke, the locusts fell to the ground, and were picked up greedily by them, and eaten, fresh or salted. "These locust-eaters," says Strabo, "are, it is true, active, good runners; but their life never exceeds forty years. As they approach this age, a horrible vermin issues from their bodies, which eats them up, beginning from the belly, and so they die a miserable death." The same tale is to be met with in a description of Admiral Drake's voyage round the world. This traveller speaks of the natives of Ethiopia, who live on locusts, as dying eaten up by winged insects bred in their own bodies.
It is difficult to explain the origin of such fables. Travellers who have visited Arabia agree in declaring that the locust is a most wholesome article of food; that it is even fattening. At any rate, it is good food for cattle and poultry. The ancients employed locusts in medicine. Dioscorides asserts that the thighs of the locust, reduced to powder, and mixed with the blood of the he-goat, is a cure for leprosy; and mixed with wine, is a specific against the bite of the scorpion, &c.
It remains for us to describe some other species of grasshoppers less destructive in their ravages than the Acridium migratorium.
In the deserts of Egypt is to be met with the great Eremobia, and in South America the Ommexeca, which walks rather than springs. On the other hand, the Tetrix springs very well. A remarkable feature about them is their thorax, which is prolonged into a point, and covers the whole body. They are small insects of gay and brilliant colours, and generally remain on the leaves of low plants, and escape easily from the hand that tries to catch them. The Tetrix subulata, of a brownish colour, is common during spring, in the environs of Paris, in the woods, and in dry and arid fields. The Pneumoræ are very strange insects. The males have a very prominent abdomen, which resembles a bladder filled with air; and their wings are very much developed. The females have the abdomen of the ordinary shape; their wings are very short, or even quite rudimentary. The former produce a sharp stridulation, by rubbing their hind-legs against a row of small tubercles, which are to be seen on each side of the abdomen. The sound is rendered still more penetrating by the vesiculous or bladder-like abdomen, the skin of which is stretched as tight as a drum. The Pneumoræ inhabit the South of Africa, as also do the Truxales, a few varieties of which, however, are to be met with in Spain, Sicily, and the South of France.
We will pass in silence over a great number of other less interesting species of Orthoptera. Those which we have described suffice to justify us in what we said above, namely, that this order contains insects of the strangest and most anomalous forms.
HYMENOPTERA.
The Order Hymenoptera comprises those insects which have four naked membranous wings, lying in repose horizontally upon the body, and intersected by a network of nerves. The name is derived from two Greek words—ὑμην, a membrane, and πτερον, a wing. The mouth is composed of two horny mandibles, jaws, and lips adapted for suction.