Plague of Locusts

"And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt; very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such."

--Exodus. X: 14.

"Its [ the Egyptian locust's] permanent breeding grounds are unknown."

Encyclopaedia'Britannica (14th edition").

Plagued by locusts this spring worse than at any time in living memory, the Egyptian Government last week drafted proposals for an anti locust congress at Cairo, communicated with the foreign offices of lands into which the pest has spread: France (Tunis), Spain (Spanish Morocco), Britain (Palestine and Transjordania), Greece and Rumania.

Hottest locust battle of the week was that fought on the grand old Egyptian front by thousands of sweating natives directed by a mere handful of cool, efficient Englishmen, commanded by the British Inspector General of the Egyptian Army, famed "Spinks Pasha," Maj. General Sir Charlton Watson Spinks.

Working with a $3,000,000 appropriation by the Egyptian parliament, employing "name throwers'' much like those Germany invented during the War, doughty Spinks Pasha held the grasshopping enemy at bay while trenches were dug along a mile long front. As billions of locusts swarmed and tumbled into the trenches paraffin oil was poured in and blazed. Latest reports were that the original locust offensive had been checked in Egypt, but a second wave was expected when eggs deposited in billions by locusts now dead should hatch. At each lay a single female locust deposits 8,000 eggs in a glutinous egg sac about the size and shape of an ordinary druggist's capsule.

In Biblical times the great Egyptian locust plague was dispersed when Pharaoh persuaded Moses to entreat the Lord of Hosts (Exodus X: 19):

"And the Lord turned a mighty strong west wind, which took away the locusts, and cast them into the Red Sea; there remained not one locust in all the coasts of Egypt."

This year, too, the vanguard of locusts flew off over the Red Sea as they invariably do, continuing on to Transjordania, where last week 25,000 natives were busy under British officers trying to exterminate them. One of the largest swarms which ever crossed the Red Sea, that of 1889, had an estimated area of 2,000 square miles, darkened the sky for days.

Scientists agree that locusts do not start to migrate because they are hungry. Indeed each locust eats comparatively little on the migratory flight, consumes much of its own fat, arrives lean but wrought up to the highest amorous pitch. Authorities now propound the theory that the locust migrations are a sexual manifestation, as though Mother Nature employed this spur to spread her grasshopping children as far and wide as possible.

Locusts are good to eat. St. Matthew says of John the Baptist: "His meat was locusts and wild honey." Shakespeare in Othello refers ecstatically to food "as luscious as locusts." Last week in the French and Spanish colonies in Africa, where the locust swarms were a nuisance but not a plague, hungry natives ate their fill, played games with the hoppers, bet on their hops. Tourists from the U. S. on Mediterranean cruises took a different view, grew vexed and grumpy as the hoppers hopped into their berths, baths, soups. In Greece and Rumania the sudden arrival of the locusts was said to have caused "panics" in the smaller villages. At Athens and Bucharest the respective ministers of agriculture organized bands of exterminators.

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