Stag-beetles haunt our oak-trees, bruise the bark, and then lick up the sap, and in its larval stage this beetle feeds in the solid wood of the finest trees, keeping near the bark. We read also of the antler moth flying “in countless myriads.”
In Galway in 1868 cockchafers arrived in hosts, forming a dense cloud which darkened the sky for a distance of three miles. “The whole country at midsummer assumed the appearance of winter. The noise of their innumerable jaws sounded like the sawing of wood, and the buzzing of their countless wings filled the air with a sound like the distant rolling of drums.” And to add to the misery of this appalling picture, the famine-stricken Irish were then “driven to eat them in order to support life”!
Whole fields of turnips are often cleared, that is, the leaves of the plants are stripped off, by myriads of the turnip fly or beetle that come flying unexpectedly, one knows not whence. It was estimated that the loss through this to one county in a single season was once £100,000, and Miss Ormerod states that in 1881, when there was an invasion of the turnip fly, spreading nearly all over our country, the loss amounted to considerably more than half a million.
A prince in Bohemia once employed two hundred men for four days and a half in collecting caterpillars during a plague of these, and they gathered twenty-three bushels of them, which they reckoned amounted to 4,500,000 of these creatures. In the year 1574 cockchafers gathered in such numbers on the banks of the Severn that the water-mills were stopped working.
Miss Edith Carrington, who has written many useful little books on out-door life, has lately brought out one called The Farmer and the Birds, in which she has collected many valuable facts and statistics which would be of interest to you.
Think of the size and the weight of one of these cockchafers, and then ponder again on what can be effected by persistent co-operation. And if for evil, yet also for good. That is our lesson just now.
One of my earliest lessons in French, when I was at school at Neuwied on the Rhine, where we had to learn many fables and moral poems by heart, both in French and German, was the story of a father who knowing that he had not long to live, called his children together and bade each of them go and cut a hazel rod and bring it to him. The rods he bade them tie in one bundle, and then he told them to try and break the sheaf of sticks. They could not do this. Next he ordered each to take his rod and break it, which of course was an easy matter. “Now,” said he, “the lesson I want to teach you is combination and united effort. So long as you keep together, you will do something; if you separate, you fail utterly.”
To co-operate means, of course, to work together. “Two are better far than one, for counsel or for fight,” says an old and well-known hymn, and a poet has written that even
“Heaven’s gate is shut to him that comes alone,
Save thou a soul, and it shall save thine own.”