THE LOCUSTS THAT GO BY BANDS.
The locusts we take as an instance of what unity in action—co-operation,
in fact—can effect. “They have,” says the wise man, “no king, yet
they go forth all of them by bands.” Creatures these are so frail,
so unsubstantial, that they can be crushed to naught almost; yet
they are able to thwart man’s watchful care, and to undo the work of
the industry of months, when they settle in hosts, brought by some
mysterious instinct, sometimes by the scarcity of those other creatures
which, under the laws that keep even the balance of nature, feed upon
them, so reducing their numbers.
Whole tracts of land are devastated by these winged armies. In the
south of England some of you have seen, during the last dry summer
that we had, what legions of caterpillars covered vast tracts of land,
eating every vestige of green and leaving bare stalks where fine
cabbages and other crops had been looked for. Ravagers of forests,
also, some of these insignificant insects have been called, and with
good reason.
The term locust we take as a symbol, and we will include here the
various groups of tiny beings which, by reason of their vast numbers
and the way in which they come and go “in bands,” become such
formidable enemies of our race.
The caterpillars of the large white cabbage butterfly, and also those
of the small white species, attack several valuable crops besides
cabbages. They consume in the larvæ stage an enormous amount when their
size is considered. Mr. Wood tells us that it has been calculated
that one caterpillar alone, a month after birth, has increased to ten
thousand times its original weight on leaving the egg, and has devoured
in the meantime no less than forty thousand times that weight in food;
and although during the winter months it may be frozen into a brittle
condition, it survives this frost uninjured and becomes itself the
parent of two broods during the ensuing summer.
These particular caterpillars feed also on the leaves of turnip
plants and on the pods that are left for seeding; they eat radishes,
horse-radish and water-cress.
[Illustration]
Some years they show in myriads. Describing a flight of butterflies
that arrived on a certain day years ago, the _Zoologist_ says that it
was one of the largest flights ever seen in this country. It crossed
the Channel from France on a Sunday in July.
“Such was the density and extent of the cloud formed by the living
mass that it completely obscured the sun from the people on board
our Continental steamers. The decks were strewed with the insects in
all directions. The flight reached England about twelve at noon, and
dispersed themselves inland and alongshore, darkening the air as they
went. During the sea-passage of the butterflies the weather was calm
and sunny, with scarcely a puff of wind stirring; but an hour or so
after they reached _terra firma_ it came on to blow great guns from the
south-west, the direction whence the insects came.” On a calm sea the
butterflies are able to settle frequently, as though the water were
land, and to rise again; otherwise, that is, in windy weather, these
long flights would be of course an impossibility.
Louis Figuier, a French entomologist, has told how a swarm of plant
lice once appeared between Bruges and Ghent, “hovering about, in
troops” in such numbers as to darken the light of day. The walls of the
houses were so covered that they could no longer be distinguished, and
the whole road from the one town to the other was rendered black by the
legions of this insect. These were called “smother-fly.”
A female Blight, as one creature is termed—a very destructive
aphis—which was shut up for observation by another naturalist, brought
forth ninety-five little ones in less than three weeks, and she can
repeat this as often as twenty times during one summer if the weather
be favourable to her. The calculations which have been made by such
scientists as Professor Huxley prove that, were it not for our allies
and friends, our unpaid and often ill-appreciated bird labourers,
“there would be room in the world for nothing else” but those tiny
creatures the aphides!
Mole crickets in the south of France and in Germany do great harm to
the pea and bean crops. They have been known to destroy one-sixth,
and even one-fourth, of a crop of young corn by eating off the roots.
Barley and potatoes also they do a vast amount of harm to. The mole
devours this insect, as it does many underground enemies of the
agriculturist, and yet mole-catchers still receive so much an acre,
year by year, from landholders for destroying the mole, whose heaps
help to fertilise the soil, even if they do make it uneven, and if not
levelled they injure the mowing machines; but their services are worth
the extra labour in levelling.
Winged beetles swarm in the end of May, and they attack beans, broad
and other beans. Horses fed on Sicilian beans are often injured
in their health by the numbers of these creatures that have been
contained in their food. One farmer in England wrote that he calculated
he had as many of these small hurtful beetles as he had beans. Another
farmer complained that he lost two whole sowings of turnips owing to
the ravages of earwigs, and a writer in the _Field_ states that he
had one September to cover his windows with muslin and to shut all
his doors at sunset because of the army of earwigs that invaded his
precincts. “They dropped,” he says, “on the supper-table, they swarmed
in the pantry, getting into fruit pies after cooking, and running out
when the pies were cut. They pushed their way into the bread, so that
we frequently cut slices of these wretches in cutting bread and butter.
They found their way into the beds, linings of hats, coats, etc. When
the doors were opened in the morning they dropped in such numbers that
the mats were literally covered with them,” etc., etc.
To stop the ravages of caterpillars in some forests trenches have
had to be dug. Into these they fall as they pour forth “in serried
columns,” after having devoured one section of a wood, when on their
way to attack a sound part. In the trenches they are stifled by numbers
of men heaping earth on them. Sometimes great trees in the forest have
to be set on fire as the only way of stopping their ravages. Then
there are concealed foes who hollow out galleries in trees before
their presence is suspected. One little insect has been dubbed by
a naturalist with the formidable name of “the great pine-gnawer.”
It ravages forests of fir-trees in such wise that not a single tree
escapes its attacks.
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.”
Perhaps one of the chief causes of spiritual deterioration in
Christians has been that fallacy that one can worship God as well alone
as in the congregations of the faithful. “Forget not the assembling of
yourselves together” we read in the Book of books. Again the gracious
presence of our Lord is especially promised “where two or three are
gathered together.”
One of the saddest stories that I ever read is that of two maiden
sisters who lived in one large room in Edinburgh. They quarrelled about
something, and so bitter was the animosity engendered that they never
spoke to each other again, although they continued to live in the same
room for many years. Perhaps they were too poor to live in separate
apartments; or they may have had that proverbial Scotch decency and
reserve that prevented them from publishing their quarrel to their
little world, as an open separation would have done.
They drew a chalk line across their joint domain, which ran from the
middle of the fireplace to the centre of the doorway, and they cooked
and ate their separate miserable meals and went in and out in solitary
fashion, and probably grimly observed each other kneel down in prayer
(_sic_) to her Maker. Perhaps in the silence of the night hours one
would lie wakeful, with bated breath, listening to the unconscious
breathing of her sleeping sister. Could anything be more dreadful?
Whether they died thus, the one left alone in a room with lips that
were finally sealed in death, the story does not reveal; it is left
half told.
“See that ye fall not out by the way,” was Joseph’s wise counsel to
his brethren. “Two are better than one.... For if they fall the one
will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth;
for he hath not another to help him up ... and a threefold cord is not
quickly broken.” So said the preacher in Ecclesiastes iv. The old words
are very forcible in their quaint simplicity.
I knew five sisters once very intimately. They had a bad father whom
they never saw—though he was living—after the eldest of the five was
about twelve, and their mother was very poor. But they clung together
and shared the daily labour—pleasure they knew little of—and when
two families of richer relatives had become poor, and the members
separated, disunion having partly ruined them, the sisters still held a
brave and respectable front to the world, being able to do this because
they kept together, serving their mother’s God and having a common
faith and practice. “Did none of them marry?” I fancy some of you
asking mentally. Yes, two have now good husbands and pleasant homes;
and God comforts and strengthens the other three in His own way which
is always for the best.
(_To be continued._)
VARIETIES.
THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
Few in the present generation know how very modern the real education
of women is. Dr. More, in the middle of last century, was frightened at
his daughter Hannah’s cleverness, and made her leave off the study of
Latin and mathematics.
Mrs. Somerville, who was born in 1780, says that when she was getting
on with mathematics her father, Admiral Fairfax, said to her mother,
“We must put a stop to this or we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket
one of these days.”
When Hannah More and her friend, Miss Harrison, began teaching poor
girls in barns and brick kitchens, they were told they would ruin
agriculture, that if servants learned to read they would read their
mistresses’ letters, and if they learned to write they would forge
their mistresses’ names.
IN A YOUNG LADY’S ALBUM.
The American author, James Russell Lowell, had as happy a knack as has
ever been known of writing album verses. When he was in this country,
Professor Max Müller’s daughter, Beatrice, asked him to give her a few
lines, and this is what he wrote—
“O’er the wet sands an insect crept,
Ages ere man on earth was known,
And patient Time, while Nature slept,
The slender tracing turned to stone.
’Twas the first autograph; and ours?
Prithee, how much of prose or song,
In league with the creative powers,
Shall ’scape Oblivion’s broom so long?”
RICHES.—Virtue is the best riches; knowledge the next, and what are
usually called riches the worst.
THE RIGHT RENDERING.
The following incident is recorded by the Bishop of Durham: Archbishop
Whately, in his last illness, begged a friend to read to him St. Paul’s
description of the Christian’s hope as he looks “for the Saviour, the
Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change” (so the friend read from the
Authorised Version) “our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto
His glorious body.”
“No, no,” interrupted the Archbishop, “give his own words! He never
called God’s works vile!”
And so we now read in the Revised Version, “Who shall fashion anew the
body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of His
glory?”
TO-MORROW.—To-morrow is the fool’s seed-time.
HIS GREAT REWARD.