Book of Monsters Part 4

The members of one species of this great family can sail for a thousand miles before the wind, and they go in such numbers that they make a cloud 2,000 square miles in extent.

They multiply in such numbers as to baffle all calculation, and every living green thing for thousands of square miles disappears down their throats, leaving the country they infest desolate. The great famine of Egypt, mentioned in the book of Exodus, the gra.s.shopper years of Kansas, which ruined thousands of families on our plains, and more recent devastations in Argentina and South Africa are examples of the tremendous effects which the migratory locusts have had upon the happiness of mankind.

The famines which have followed in their wake have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings and ruined the lives of millions of others. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the farmer must expect to lose his crop every few years from the devastations of these beasts, that we have not yet realized that it would be profitable to spend vast sums of money in learning how to fight them.

In the evolution of the race, this change will come about, and I feel that no honor is too great to bestow upon the American entomologists who have led the world in its fight with these enemies of the human race. Some day these quiet, resourceful, far-sighted men of knowledge will take their places beside the organizers of industry and the warriors of mankind in the hero wors.h.i.+p of our boys and girls.

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A BABY GRa.s.sHOPPER

A baby creature, scarcely two weeks since it issued from a gra.s.shopper egg, and yet with two moults behind it--two bright green baby skins cast off!

Imagine looking forward, as this baby creature does, to the day when its internal air sacs shall be filled with air and the pads on its back have grown so long and parchment-like that it can leave its hopping, terrestrial existence and sail away across the fields. Until that time, however, it must be content with its six spiny legs, pus.h.i.+ng its way among the blades of gra.s.s, tasting everything green and eating what it likes, and hiding from its enemies when moulting time comes round.

A young chick finds itself shut inside the eggsh.e.l.l and must work its way out alone, but the young gra.s.shoppers when they hatch out find themselves--the whole nestful--shut in a hardened case in the ground made by their mother, and it takes half a dozen of them working together to dislodge the lid which shuts them in.

Unlike the beetles and the b.u.t.terflies, which spring full-fledged from the metamorphosis of a caterpillar, the gra.s.shopper comes to be a winged creature by slow stages, each one a little more advanced than the former, with wings a little better developed. The baby gra.s.shopper is essentially a small, wingless adult, and not a grub or larva in the ordinary sense.

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A YOUNG GRa.s.sHOPPER'S SKELETON

When the young gra.s.shopper emerges from the egg, it is very small indeed--a wingless, helpless little creature, all legs and mouth.

It pa.s.ses through successive ages, or stages, as they are called, each one of which is separated from the other by a moult or casting of its outer sh.e.l.l.

These moults take place at fixed periods, and as the insect finds itself restrained by its firm, inelastic skeleton, a longitudinal rent occurs along the back, and the insect, soft and dangerously helpless, struggles out of the old skin, inclosed in a new but delicate cuticle, which takes some time to harden and color up.

Some people go to great trouble and expense to keep the baby portraits and even the baby shoes, and I cannot help wondering whether a full-grown gra.s.shopper, leading a life in the open air, is ever interested in observing the baby skeletons which show its five stages of terrestrial life.

What an interesting collection could be made of these insects' skeletons, photographed large enough so that we could see and study them!

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THE GRa.s.sHOPPER IS GOOD TO EAT

How much mere prejudice controls us! Whence came our aversion to the spotless, winged gra.s.shopper as food and our fondness for the flesh of the wallowing swine? We thoughtlessly pa.s.s on to our children the idea that certain things are not good to eat while others are, and so, although the gra.s.shopper has been eaten for centuries by millions of people, even by the ancient a.s.syrians, and is today one of the candied delicacies of j.a.pan, our American boys, hungry as they always are, have not yet caught them to cook over their campfires.

The spiny legs deter us, perhaps, and yet, when one thinks that we eat up all of the soft-sh.e.l.led crabs, sardines, reed birds and some other delicacies, that seems to be no argument at all against the pasture fed and fattened locust of our summer time.

In Barbary, according to Miss Margaret Morley, the recipe in common use is to boil them for half an hour, remove the heads and wings and legs, sprinkle with salt and then fry them and season with vinegar to taste.

The Maoris of New Zealand, it is said, prefer them to the pigeons which they raise.

The Bedouins bake then in a heated pit in the ground, much as a woodsman cooks his beans, and later dries them in the sun, then grinds them to powder and makes a kind of gruel, or else he eats them without grinding, simply removing the legs and wings with his fingers as one would the sh.e.l.l of a shrimp.

Some people say they taste like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, while others compare them in flavor to prawns.

Now, whether all the different kinds are good or not, and which are best to eat are questions which the American boys most find out for themselves--the girls, it is a.s.sumed, will take no part in this new field of cookery!

Should any boy desire to dip into this vast subject and become an acridophagus it would take him back in his study to the hieroglyphics on some of the oldest monuments of the human race and be a most fascinating subject.

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A GRa.s.sHOPPER'S EAR IS UNDER ITS WING

(_Dissosteira carolina_, Linn.)

If you raise the wing of a full-grown gra.s.shopper and look behind its big fat thigh, you will see a strange hole into its body. This is supposed to be its ear, but what it hears and what it does not hear, who can tell?

When on a warm summer day you hear a male gra.s.shopper chirping, for the males alone can sing, you can think that somewhere nearby, perhaps with wings lifted to hear the song better, sits some attentive female whose ears are tuned to catch the plaintiveness of this courting song.

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THE GRa.s.sHOPPER'S HEARING ORGAN

(_Dissosteira carolina_, Linn.)

As we grow older and certain sounds which we heard in childhood with the greatest ease become harder for us to hear and are finally lost to as altogether, we begin to appreciate the relative character of sound. Some boys can hear the faintest twitter of the shyest song bird in the tree tops, while others strain their ears in vain to catch its note.

Is it any wonder then that men should be puzzled to know just what the true gra.s.shopper hears? They know there are males of certain species which sing so loud they make our ears ache, but there are others whose noises, if they make any, have never yet been heard by human ears, and yet they all have these ears. They believe, too, that there are certain sounds the gra.s.shopper can hear without the use of these special ears.

So whether this strange organ furnishes a special means by which the males and females find each other or not, and what part it has played throughout the centuries in the development of this marvelous form of living matter, are things that man may be a long time yet in finding out.

In the photograph it lies to the left, a dark kidney-shaped opening with the ear drum membrane at an angle just inside its rim. It has a well-formed tympanum, and nerves and muscles of a complex nature.

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THE SHORT-WINGED GREEN LOCUST

(_Dicromorpha viridis_, Scudd.)

Whether this creature has a personality or not may be forever extremely difficult for humans to decide. Its eyes that look like cows' eyes really cast hundreds of images on a special kind of brain, so different from our own that we cannot understand it, and then, besides these great big eyes, it has three others scarcely visible in the picture. Its short-ringed horns are not horns at all, but sense organs of so complicated a nature that we do not yet know certainly whether they are organs of smell or not, and it is supposed that they may be the seat of sense organs that we humans do not have.

The jumping legs of the creature are filled with powerful muscles, which, when they expand, can hurl it through the air and enable it to escape from its enemies. On the inner side of the femur is a musical instrument, a row of hard, bead-like projections, which are very highly developed in the males, but not at all in the females. When one of the veins of the upper wing, which is prominent and has a sharp knife edge, is sc.r.a.ped over these projections, a musical sound is made by the vibration of the whole wing.

It would seem to be the case, as with so many of the birds, that only the male can sing, the female being mute.

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THE KATYDID