ells us it is possible to enumerate as
many as ten kinds. It wakens into existence and activity as early as the
month of March; but instances are not wanting, as in our present history,
of its appearance as late as June. Even one flight comprises myriads upon
myriads passing imagination, to which the drops of rain or the sands of
the sea are the only fit comparison; and hence it is almost a proverbial
mode of expression in the East (as may be illustrated by the sacred pages
to which we just now referred), by way of describing a vast invading army,
to liken it to the locusts. So dense are they, when upon the wing, that it
is no exaggeration to say that they hide the sun, from which circumstance
indeed their name in Arabic is derived. And so ubiquitous are they when
they have alighted on the earth, that they simply cover or clothe its
surface.

This last characteristic is stated in the sacred account of the plagues of
Egypt, where their faculty of devastation is also mentioned. The
corrupting fly and the bruising and prostrating hail had preceded them in
that series of visitations, but _they_ came to do the work of ruin more
thoroughly. For not only the crops and fruits, but the foliage of the
forest itself, nay, the small twigs and the bark of the trees are the
victims of their curious and energetic rapacity. They have been known even
to gnaw the door-posts of the houses. Nor do they execute their task in so
slovenly a way, that, as they have succeeded other plagues so they may
have successors themselves. They take pains to spoil what they leave. Like
the Harpies, they smear every thing that they touch with a miserable
slime, which has the effect of a virus in corroding, or, as some say, in
scorching and burning it. And then, as if all this were little, when they
can do nothing else, they die;--as if out of sheer malevolence to man, for
the poisonous elements of their nature are then let loose, and dispersed
abroad, and create a pestilence; and they manage to destroy many more by
their death than in their life.

Such are the locusts,--whose existence the ancient heretics brought forward
as their palmary proof that there was an evil creator, and of whom an
Arabian writer shows his national horror, when he says that they have the
head of a horse, the eyes of an elephant, the neck of a bull, the horns of
a stag, the breast of a lion, the belly of a scorpion, the wings of an
eagle, the legs of a camel, the feet of an ostrich