THE LOCUSTS: THEIR FUNCTION; THEIR ORGAN OF SOUND
“Mind you are ready, children, to-morrow morning, before the sun gets
too hot: we are going Locust-hunting.”
This announcement throws the household into great excitement at
bed-time. What do my little helpmates see in their dreams? Blue wings,
red wings, suddenly flung out fanwise; long, saw-toothed legs,
pale-blue or pink, which kick out when we hold their owners in our
fingers; great shanks acting as springs that make the insect leap
forward like a projectile shot from some dwarf catapult hidden in the
grass.
What they behold in sleep’s sweet magic lantern I also happen to see.
Life lulls us with the same simple things in its first stages and its
last.
If there be one peaceful and safe form of hunting, one that comes
within the powers of old age and childhood alike, it is Locust-hunting.
Oh, what delicious mornings we owe to it! What happy moments when the
mulberries are black and allow my assistants to go pilfering here and
there in the bushes! What memorable excursions on the slopes covered
with sparse grass, tough and burnt yellow by the sun! I retain a vivid
recollection of all this; and my children will do the same.
Little Paul has nimble legs, a ready hand and a piercing eye. He
inspects the clumps of everlastings where the Tryxalis solemnly nods
his sugar-loaf head; he scrutinizes the bushes out of which the big
Grey Locust suddenly flies like a little bird surprised by the hunter.
Great disappointment on the part of the latter, who, after first
rushing off at full speed, stops and gazes in wonder at this mock
Swallow flying far away. He will have better luck another time. We
shall not go home without a few of those magnificent prizes.
Younger than her brother, Marie Pauline patiently watches for the
Italian Locust, with his pink wings and carmine hind-legs; but she
really prefers another jumper, the most elegantly attired of all. Her
favourite wears a St. Andrew’s cross on the small of his back, which is
marked by four white, slanting stripes. His livery has patches of
verdigris, the exact colour of the patina on old bronze medals. With
her hand raised in the air, ready to swoop down, she approaches very
softly, stooping low. Whoosh! That’s done it! Quick, a screw of paper
to receive the treasure, which, thrust head first into the opening,
plunges with one bound to the bottom of the funnel.
Thus are our bags distended one by one; thus are our boxes filled.
Before the heat becomes too great to bear, we are in possession of a
number of varied specimens which, raised in captivity, will perhaps
teach us something, if we know how to question them. Thereupon we go
home again. The Locust has made three people happy at a small cost.
The first question that I put to my boarders is this:
“What function do you perform in the fields?”
You have a bad reputation, I know; the text-books describe you as
noxious. Do you deserve this reproach? I take the liberty of doubting
it, except, of course, in the case of the terrible ravagers who form
the scourge of Africa and the east.
The ill repute of those voracious eaters has left its mark on you all,
though I look upon you as much more useful than injurious. Never, so
far as I know, have our peasants complained of you. What damage could
they lay to your charge?
You nibble the tops of the tough grasses which the Sheep refuses to
touch; you prefer the lean swards to the fat pastures; you browse on
sterile land where none but you would find the wherewithal to feed
himself; you live upon what could never be used without the aid of your
healthy stomach.
Besides, by the time that you frequent the fields, the only thing that
might tempt you, the green wheat, has long since yielded its grain and
disappeared. If you happen to get into the kitchen-gardens and levy
toll on them to some slight extent, it is not a rank offence. A man can
console himself for a piece bitten out of a leaf or two of salad.
To measure the importance of things by the foot-rule of one’s own
turnip-patch is a horrible method, which makes us forget the essential
for the sake of a trivial detail. The short-sighted man would upset the
order of the universe rather than sacrifice a dozen plums. If he thinks
of the insect at all, it is only to speak of its extermination.
Fortunately, this is not and never will be in his power. Look at the
consequences, for instance, of the disappearance of the Locust, who is
accused of stealing a few crumbs from earth’s rich table. In September
and October, the Turkeys are driven into the stubble-fields, under the
charge of a child armed with two long reeds. The expanse over which the
gobbling flock slowly spreads is bare, dry and burnt by the sun. At the
most, a few ragged thistles raise their belated heads. What do the
birds do in a desert like this, simply reeking with famine? They cram
themselves, in order to do honour to the Christmas table; they wax fat;
their flesh becomes firm and appetizing. With what, pray? With Locusts,
whom they snap up here and there, a delicious stuffing for their greedy
crops. This autumnal manna, which costs nothing and is richly
flavoured, contributes to the elaboration and the improvement of the
succulent roast that will be so largely eaten on the festive evening.
When the Guinea-fowl, that domesticated game-bird, roams around the
farm, uttering her rasping note, what is it that she seeks? Seeds, no
doubt, but, above all things, Locusts, who puff her out under the wings
with a pad of fat and give greater flavour to her flesh.
The Hen, much to our advantage, is just as fond of them. She well knows
the virtues of that dainty dish, which acts as a tonic and increases
her laying-capacity. When left at liberty, she hardly ever fails to
lead her family to the stubble-fields, so that they may learn how to
snap up the exquisite mouthful deftly. In fact, all the denizens of the
poultry-yard, when free to wander about at will, owe to the Locust a
valuable addition to their diet.
It becomes a much more important matter outside our domestic fowls. If
you are a sportsman, if you are able to appreciate the value of the
Red-legged Partridge, the glory of our southern hills, open the crop of
the bird which you have just brought down. You will see that it
contains a splendid certificate to the services rendered by the
much-maligned insect. You will find it, nine times out of ten, more or
less crammed with Locusts. The Partridge dotes on them, prefers them to
seed as long as he is able to catch them. This highly-flavoured,
substantial, stimulating fare would almost make him forget the
existence of seeds, if it were only there all the year round.
Let us now consult the illustrious black-footed tribe, so warmly
celebrated by Tousserel. [74] The head of the family is the Wheatear,
the Cul-blanc, [75] as the Provençal calls him, who grows disgracefully
fat in September and supplies delicious material for the skewer. At the
time when I used to indulge in ornithological expeditions, I made a
practice of jotting down the contents of the birds’ crops and gizzards,
so as to become acquainted with their diet. Here is the Wheatear’s bill
of fare: Locusts, first of all; next, many various kinds of Beetles,
such as Weevils, Opatra, Chrysomelæ, or Golden-apple-beetles, Cassidæ,
or Tortoise-beetles, and Harpali; in the third place, Spiders, Iuli,
[76] Woodlice and small Snails; lastly and rarely, bramble-berries and
the berries of the Cornelian cherry.
As you see, there is a little of all kinds of small game, just as it
comes. The insect-eater does not turn his attention to berries except
in the last resort, at seasons of dearth. Out of forty-eight cases
mentioned in my notes, vegetable food appears only three times, in
trifling proportions. The predominant item, both as regards frequency
and quantity, is the Locust, the smaller specimens being chosen, in
order not to tax the bird’s swallowing-powers.
Even so with the other little birds of passage which, when autumn
comes, call a halt in Provence and prepare for the great pilgrimage by
accumulating on their rumps a travelling-allowance of fat. All of them
feast on the Locust, that rich fare; all, in the waste lands and
fallows, gather as best they can the hopping tit-bit, that source of
vigour for flying. Locusts are the manna of little birds on their
autumnal journey.
Nor does man himself scorn them. An Arab author quoted by General
Daumas [77] in his book, Le Grand désert, tells us:
“Grasshoppers [78] are of good nourishment for men and Camels.
Their claws, wings and head are taken away and they are eaten fresh
or dried, either roast or boiled and served with flesh, flour and
herbs.
“When dried in the sun, they are ground to powder and mixed with
milk or kneaded with flour; and they are then cooked with fat or
with butter and salt.
“Camels eat them greedily and are given them dried or roast, heaped
in a hollow between two layers of charcoal. Thus also do the
Nubians eat them.
“When Miriam [79] prayed God that she might eat flesh unpolluted by
blood, God sent her Grasshoppers.
“When the wives of the Prophet were sent Grasshoppers as a gift,
they placed some of these in baskets and sent them to other women.
“Once, when the Caliph Omar was asked if it were lawful to eat
Grasshoppers, he made answer:
“‘Would that I had a basket of them to eat!’
“Wherefore, from this testimony, it is very sure that, by the grace
of God, Grasshoppers were given to man for his nourishment.”
Without going so far as the Arab naturalist, which would presuppose a
power of digestion not bestowed on every man, I feel entitled to say
that the Locust is a gift of God to a multitude of birds, as witness
the long array of gizzards which I consulted.
Many others, notably the reptile, hold him in esteem. I have found him
in the belly of the Rassado, that terror of the small girls of
Provence, I mean the Eyed Lizard, who loves rocky shelters turned into
a furnace by a torrid sun. And I have often caught the little Grey
Lizard of the walls in the act of carrying off, in his tapering snout,
the spolia opima of some long-awaited Acridian.
Even fish revel in him, when good fortune brings him to them. The
Locust’s leap has no definite goal. A projectile discharged blindly,
the insect comes down wherever the unpremeditated release of its
springs shoots it. If the place where it falls happen to be the water,
a fish is there at once to gobble up the dripping victim. It is
sometimes a fatal dainty, for anglers use the Locust when they wish to
bait their hook with a particularly attractive morsel.
Without expatiating further on the devourers of this small game, I can
clearly see the great usefulness of the Acridian who by successive
leaps transmits to man, that most wasteful of eaters, the lean grass
now converted into exquisite fare. Gladly therefore would I say, with
the Arab writer:
“Wherefore, from this testimony, it is very sure that, by the grace of
God, Grasshoppers were given to man for his nourishment.”
One thing alone makes me hesitate: the direct consumption of the
Locust. As regards indirect consumption, under the form of Partridge,
young Turkey and others, none will think of denying him his praises. Is
direct consumption then so unpleasant? That was not the opinion of
Omar, [80] the mighty caliph, the destroyer of the library of
Alexandria. His stomach was as rude as his intellect; and, by his own
account, he would have relished a basket of Grasshoppers.
Long before him, others were content to eat them, though in this case
it was a wise frugality. Clad in his Camel’s-hair garment, St. John the
Baptist, the bringer of good tidings and the great stirrer of the
populace in the days of Herod, lived in the desert on Grasshoppers and
wild honey:
“And his meat was locusts and wild honey,” says the Gospel according to
St. Matthew.
Wild honey I know, if only from the pots of the Chalicodoma. [81] It is
a very agreeable food. There remains the Grasshopper of the desert,
otherwise the Locust. In my youth, like every small boy, I appreciated
a Grasshopper’s leg, which I used to eat raw. It is not without
flavour. To-day let us rise a peg higher and try the fare of Omar and
St. John the Baptist.
I capture some fat Locusts and have them cooked in a very rough and
ready fashion, fried with butter and salt, as the Arab author
prescribes. We all of us, big and little, partake of the queer dish at
dinner. We pronounce favourably upon the caliph’s delicacy. It is far
superior to the Cicadæ extolled by Aristotle. It has a certain shrimpy
flavour, a taste that reminds one of grilled Crab; and, were it not
that the shell is very tough for such slight edible contents, I would
go to the length of saying that it is good, without, however, feeling
any desire for more.
My curiosity as a naturalist has now twice allowed itself to be tempted
by the dishes of antiquity: Cicadæ first; Locusts next. Neither the one
nor the other roused my enthusiasm. We must leave these things to the
powerful jaws of the negroes and the huge appetite of which the famous
caliph gave proof.
The queasiness of our stomachs, however, in no way decreases the
Locusts’ merits. Those little browsers of the burnt grass play a great
part in the workshop where our food is prepared. They swarm in vast
legions which roam over the barren wastes, pecking here and there,
turning what could not otherwise be used into a foodstuff which is
passed on to a host of consumers, including, first and foremost, the
bird that often falls to man’s share.
Pricked relentlessly by the needs of the stomach, the world knows no
more imperative duty than the acquisition of food. To secure a seat in
the refectory, each animal expends its sum total of activity, industry,
toil, trickery and strife; and the general banquet, which should be a
joy, is to many a torment. Man is far from escaping the miseries of the
struggle for food. On the contrary, only too often he tastes them in
all their bitterness.
Ingenious as he is, will he succeed in freeing himself from them?
Science says yes. Chemistry promises, in the near future, a solution of
the problem of subsistence. The sister science, physics, is preparing
the way. Already it is contemplating how to get more and better work
done by the sun, that great sluggard who thinks that he has done his
duty by us when he sweetens our grapes and ripens our corn. It will
bottle his heat, garner his rays, in order to control them and employ
them where we think fit.
With these supplies of energy, the hearths will blaze, the wheels will
turn, the pestles pound, the graters grate, the rollers grind; and the
work of agriculture, so wasteful at present, thwarted as it is by the
inclemency of the seasons, will become factory-work, yielding
economical and safe returns.
Then chemistry will step in, with its legion of cunning reagents. It
will turn everything into nutritious matter, in a highly concentrated
form, capable of being assimilated in its entirety and leaving hardly
any foul residue. A loaf of bread will be a pill; a rumpsteak a drop of
jelly. Of agricultural labour, the inferno of barbarian times, nothing
will remain but a memory, of interest only to the historians. The last
Sheep and the last Ox will figure, neatly stuffed, as curiosities in
our museums, together with the Mammoth dug up from the Siberian
ice-fields.
All that old lumber—herds and flocks, seeds, fruits and vegetables—is
doomed to disappear some day. Progress demands it, we are told; and the
chemist’s retort, which, in its presumptuous fashion, recognizes
nothing as impossible, repeats the assertion.
This golden age of foodstuffs leaves me very incredulous. When it is a
question of obtaining some new toxin, science displays alarming
ingenuity. Our laboratory collections are veritable arsenals of
poisons. When the object is to invent a still in which potatoes shall
be made to yield torrents of alcohol capable of turning us into a
nation of sots, the resources of industry know no limits. But to
procure by artificial means a single mouthful of really nourishing
matter is a very different business. Never has any such product
simmered in our retorts. The future, beyond a doubt, will do no better.
Organized matter, the only true food, escapes the formulæ of the
laboratory. Its chemist is life.
We shall do well therefore to preserve agriculture and our herds. Let
us leave our nourishment to be prepared by the patient work of plants
and animals, let us mistrust the brutal factory and keep our confidence
for more delicate methods and, in particular, for the Locust’s stomach,
which assists in the making of the Christmas Turkey. That stomach has
culinary receipts which the chemist’s retort will always envy without
succeeding in imitating them.
This picker-up of nutritive trifles, destined to support a crowd of
paupers, possesses musical powers wherewith to express his joys.
Consider a Locust at rest, blissfully digesting his meal and enjoying
the sunshine. With sharp strokes of the bow, three or four times
repeated and spaced with pauses, he sings his ditty. He scrapes his
sides with his great hind-legs, using now one, now the other, anon both
at a time.
The result is very poor, so slight indeed that I am obliged to have
recourse to little Paul’s ear in order to make sure that there is a
sound at all. Such as it is, it resembles the creaking of the point of
a needle pushed across a sheet of paper. There you have the whole song,
so near akin to silence.
There is nothing more to be expected from so rudimentary an instrument.
We have nothing here similar to what the Grasshopper clan have shown
us: no toothed bow, no vibrating membrane stretched into a drum. Let
us, for instance, take a look at the Italian Locust (Caloptenus
italicus, Lin.), whose apparatus of sound is repeated in the other
stridulating Acridians. His hinder thighs are keel-shaped above and
below. Each surface, moreover, has two powerful longitudinal nervures.
Between these main parts there is, in either case, a graduated row of
smaller, chevron-shaped nervures; and the whole thing is as prominent
and as plainly marked on this outer side as on the inner one. And what
surprises me even more than this similarity between the two surfaces is
that all these nervures are smooth. Lastly, the lower edge of the
wing-cases, the edge rubbed by the thighs which serve as a bow, also
has nothing particular about it. We see, as indeed we do all over the
wing-cases, nervures that are powerful but devoid of any rasping
roughness or the least denticulation.
What can this artless attempt at a musical instrument produce? Just as
much as a dry membrane will emit when you rub it. And for the sake of
this trifle the insect lifts and lowers its thighs, in sharp jerks, and
is satisfied with the result. It rubs its sides very much as we rub our
hands together in sign of contentment, with no intention of making a
sound. That is its own particular way of expressing its joy in life.
Examine it when the sky is partly obscured and the sun shines
intermittently. There comes a rift in the clouds. Forthwith the thighs
begin to scrape, increasing their activity as the sun grows hotter. The
strains are very brief, but they are renewed so long as the sunshine
continues. The sky becomes overcast. Then and there the song ceases, to
be resumed with the next gleam of sunlight, always in brief spasms.
There is no mistaking it: here, in these fond lovers of the light, we
have a mere expression of happiness. The Locust has his moments of
gaiety when his crop is full and the sun benign.
Not all the Acridians indulge in this joyous rubbing. The Tryxalis
(Truxalis nasuta, Lin.), who sports a pair of immensely elongated
hind-legs, maintains a gloomy silence even under the most vigorous
caresses of the sun. I have never seen him move his shanks like a bow;
he seems unable to use them—so long are they—for anything but hopping.
Dumb likewise, apparently as a consequence of the excessive length of
his hind-legs, the big Grey Locust (Pachytilus cinerescens, Fabr.) has
a peculiar way of diverting himself. The giant often visits me in the
enclosure, even in the depth of winter. In calm weather, when the sun
is hot, I surprise him in the rosemaries, with his wings unfurled and
fluttering rapidly for a quarter of an hour at a time, as though for
flight. His twirling is so gentle, in spite of its extreme speed, as to
create hardly a perceptible rustle.
Others still are much less well-endowed. One such is the Pedestrian
Locust (Pezotettix pedestris, Lin.), the companion of the Alpine
Analota on the ridges of the Ventoux. This foot-passenger strolling
amid the paronychias (P. serpyllifola) which lie spread in silvery
expanses over the Alpine region; this short-jacketed hopper, the guest
of the androsaces (A. villosa), whose tiny flowers, white as the
neighbouring snows, smile from out of their rosy eyes, has the same
fresh colouring as the plants around him. The sunlight, less veiled in
mists in the loftier regions, has made him a costume combining beauty
and simplicity: a pale-brown satin back; a yellow abdomen; big thighs
coral-red below; hind-legs a glorious azure-blue, with an ivory anklet
in front. But, being incapable of going beyond the larval form, this
dandy remains short-coated.
He has for wing-cases two wrinkled slips, distant one from the other
and hardly covering the first segment of the abdomen, and for wings two
stumps that are even more abbreviated. All this hardly covers his
nakedness down to the waist. Any one seeing him for the first time
takes him for a larva and is wrong. It is indeed the adult insect, ripe
for mating; and the insect will remain in this undress to the end.
Is it necessary to add that, with this skimpy jacket, stridulation is
impossible? The big hind-thighs are there, it is true; but what is
lacking, for them to rub upon, is the grating surface, the edge of the
wing-cases. Whereas the other Locusts are not to be described as noisy,
this one is absolutely dumb. In vain have the most delicate ears around
me listened with might and main: there has never been the least sound
during the three months’ home breeding. This silent one must have other
means of expressing his joys and summoning his partner to the wedding.
What are they? I do not know.
Nor do I know why the insect deprives itself of wings and remains a
plodding wayfarer, when its near kinsmen, on the same Alpine swards,
are excellently equipped for flight. It possesses the germs of wing and
wing-case, gifts which the egg gives to the larva; and it does not
think of using these germs by developing them. It persists in hopping,
with no further ambition; it is satisfied to go on foot, to remain a
Pedestrian Locust, as the nomenclators call it, when it might, one
would think, acquire wings, that higher mechanism of locomotion.
Rapid flitting from crest to crest, over the valleys deep in snow; easy
flight from a shorn pasture to one not yet exploited: can these be
negligible advantages to the Pedestrian Locust? Obviously not. The
other Acridians and in particular his fellow-dwellers on the
mountain-tops possess wings and are all the better for them. What is
his reason for not doing as they do? It would be very profitable to
extract from their sheaths the sails which he keeps packed away in
useless stumps; and he does not do it. Why?
“Arrested development,” says some one.
Very well. Life is arrested half-way through its work; the insect does
not attain the ultimate form of which it bears the emblem. For all its
scientific turn of phrase, the reply is not really a reply at all. The
question returns under another guise: what causes that arrested
development?
The larva is born with the hope of flying at maturity. As a pledge of
that fair future, it carries on its back four sheaths in which the
precious germs lie slumbering. Everything is arranged according to the
rules of normal evolution. Thereupon, suddenly, the organism does not
fulfil its promises; it is false to its engagements; it leaves the
adult insect without sails, leaves it with only useless rags.
Are we to lay this nudity to the charge of the harsh conditions of
Alpine life? Not at all, for the other hoppers, living on the same
grassy slopes, manage very well to achieve the wings foretold by the
larva’s rudiments.
Men tell us that, from one attempt to another, from progress to
progress, under the stimulus of necessity, animals end by acquiring
this or that organ. No other creative intervention is accepted than
that of need. This, for instance, is the way in which the Locusts went
to work, in particular those whom I see fluttering over the ridges of
the Ventoux. From their niggardly larval flaps they are supposed to
have extracted wings and wing-cases, by virtue of secret and mysterious
labours rendered fruitful by the centuries.
Very well, O my illustrious masters! And now tell me, if you please,
what reasons persuaded the Pedestrian Locust not to go beyond his rude
outline of a flying-apparatus. He also, surely, must have felt the
prick of necessity for ages and ages; during his laborious tumbles amid
the broken stones, he must have felt the advantage that it would be for
him to be relieved of his weight by means of wing-power; and all the
endeavours of his organism, striving to achieve a better lot, have not
yet succeeded in spreading bladewise his incipient wings.
If we accept your theories, under the same conditions of urgent
necessity, diet, climate and habits, some are successful and manage to
fly, others fail and remain clumsy pedestrians. Short of resting
satisfied with words and passing off chalk for cheese, I abandon the
explanations offered. Sheer ignorance is far preferable, for it
prejudges nothing.
But let us leave this backward one who is a stage behind his kinsmen,
no one knows why. Anatomy has its throwbacks, its halts, its sudden
leaps, all of which defy our curiosity. In the presence of the
unfathomable problem of origins, the best thing is to bow in all
humility and pass on.