It is difficult to explain the origin of such fables. Travellers who have visited Arabia agree in declaring that the locust is a most wholesome article of food; that it is even fattening. At any rate, it is good food for cattle and poultry. The ancients employed locusts in medicine. Dioscorides asserts that the thigh of the locust, reduced to \ powder, and mixed with the blood of the he-goat, is a cure for leprosy \ and mixed with wine, is a specific against the bite of the scorpion, &c. It remains for us to describe some other species of grasshoppers less destructive in their ravages than the Acridium migratorinm.

In the deserts of Egypt is to be met with the great Eremobia^

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and in South America the Ommexeca, which walks rather than springs. On the other hand, the Tetrix springs very well. A remarkable feature about them is their thorax, which is prolonged into a point, and covers the whole body. They are small insects of gay and brilliant colours, and generally remain on the leaves of low plants, and escape easily from the hand that tries to catch them. The Tetrix subulata, of a brownish colour, is common during spring, in the environs of Paris, in the woods, and in dry and arid fields. The Pneumoræ are very strange insects. The males have a very prominent abdomen, which resembles a bladder filled with air; and their wings are very much developed. The females have the abdomen of the ordinary shape; their wings are very short, or even quite rudimentery. The former produce a sharp stridulation, by rubbing their hind-legs against a row of small tubercles, which are to be seen on each side of the abdomen. The sound is rendered still more penetrating by the vesiculous or bladder-like abdomen, the skin of which is stretched as tight as a drum. The Pneumoræ inhabit the South of Africa, as also do the Truxales, a few varieties of which, however, are to be met with in Spain, Sicily, and the South of France.

We will pass in silence over a great number of other less interesting species of Orthoptera. Those which we have described suffice to justify us in what we said above, namely, that this order contains insects of the strangest and most anomalous forms.

3^3

VI.

HYMENOPTERA.

The Order Hymenoptera comprises those insects which have four naked membranous wings, lying in repose horizontally upon the body, and intersected by a network of nerves. The name is derived from two Greek words — v/xt^u, a membrane, and wTipov, a wing. The mouth is composed of two horny mandibles, jaws, and lips adapted for suction. It is amongst the Hymenoptera that we meet with the most industrious insects, some of which seem to possess real intelligence. These little animals offer the most admirable examples of sociability Born architects, they construct dwelUngs marvellously contrived, S which serve them, at the same time, as nurseries in which to rear I their progeny, and storehouses in which to lay by their provisions. \ Nothing can equal the solicitude with which they watch over their^ young larvce, still incapable of motion. They form republics, governed 1 by immutable laws, and make war against their enemies in order of \ battle. They have predilections or antipathies for those who court their society, on account of the material advantages they derive from them. The Bees, the Humble Bees, the Wasps, and the Ants, are the best-known types of this order of insects. Among a great number of the Hymenoptera the females are armed with a sting, or lancet, a wound from which causes great pain. All these insects undergo complete metamorphoses. In the larva state the aculeate species are incapable of motion and of obtaining food; but Nature has provided in different ways for their preservation. They are often lodged and fed by the workers of the tribe, unfruitful females, which, with a self-denial very rare in Nature, seem to have no other vocation than to sacrihce themselves to the welfare of the larvse. The workers construct the nest and bring in the provisions. This is the case with

|ioney bees, wasps, and aiits,

Some deposit their eggs in the bodies of other insects, which die immediately the larvae which live in them have attained their full development. The larvae of the Chakididce and of the IchneumonidcB furnish examples of Hymenoptera which inhabit the interior of the body of another insect. Other parasitical species carry on their depredations in a different way. They content themselves with laying their eggs in the nests of other species of the order, which have the advantage over them in being able to construct for themselves places of refuge. Their larvae Hve thus on their neighbours' goods, nourishing themselves on the provisions which were laid up for others. In this way live the C/eptes, the Chry sides ^ &c. Lastly, others, such as the Gall-insects, and the Tenthredinetcz^ or Saw-flies, live in their first state exposed on plants, and feed upon their leaves.

We shall only here describe the principal families of the Order Hymenoptera, which contains a considerable number of species. These families will be — ist. The Apiarice^ containing the Honey Bees, the Melipodes^ and the Humble Bees. 2nd. The Vespiaria^ or Wasps. 3rd. The Fortnicarice^ or Ants. 4th. The GaUicoIcE^ or Gall-insects. Bees. — Man, from the very earliest age, before any civilisation existed, knew the value of bees, and took advantage of the products of these industrious insects. The Bible makes mention of honey bees. Their Hebrew name is Deborah. The Greeks called them by the name of Melissa, or Melitta.

Their wonderful architectural powers, their economical forethought, the wonderful combination of their reasonings, which denote a real intelligence, their admirable social organisation, have in all times fixed the attention of naturalists, as they have also that of poets and thinkers. Virgil has celebrated them. In the fourth book of his Georgics, the Latin poet has summed up all that the ancients knew about bees. He paints with a good deal of truth many traits in their history, points out their enemies, and sets forth with accuracy all the care that should be taken of them. In the words of the Mantuan poet, they are heavenly gifts, dona ccelestia, and their intelligence excited his admiration:—

** His quibus signis atque haec exempla sccuti. Esse apibus partem divinae mentis, et haustus yEthereos dixere."....

Let US hasten to say, however, that all which the ancients, naturalists or poets, Greek or Latin, relate on the subject of bees, is a^ mixture of truth and error, and rests generally on mere supposition.

Aristotle knew well the three sorts of individuals which are comprised flnder the title of bees, and some other principal facts relating to their history; but these facts are not stated accurately and precisely in his account of them, and they are, above all, misinterpreted. The Greek philosopher understood insects in general very badly. He made them spring from the leaves of trees, and brought forward a multitude of errors about them, which the most simple observation would have sufficed to dissipate. Pliny tells us that Aristomachus of Soles consecrated fifty-eight years to the observation of the habits of the bee, and that PliiHscus of Thrace passed, for the same motive, all his life in the forests. But this devotion to one object does not appear to have produced much result, if one compares the discoveries of our own age with the errors which Pliny, Aristotle, and Columella have chronicled respecting them. Pliny says that bees occupy the first rank among insects, and that they were created for man, for whom their work procures honey and wax. He adds that they form poHtical associations, that they have councils, chiefs, and even a code of morality and principles.

One sees by this opinion of the Raman naturalist in what high esteem the ancients held bees. But they had the most singular ideas on the reproduction of these little beings; and as no one had ever seen their generation, they invented fable after fable to explain their origin. Some pretended that bees sprang from an ox recently killed, and buried in manure. Others added that they only sprang into existence from the chest of a young ox killed with violence. The most courageous bees came from the belly of a lion in a state of putrefaction. It was from the head of this same animal, in a state of corruption, that the kmgs (i.e., the queens) were formed. The carcases of cows furnished the mild and tractable bees; a calf could only furnish small and weak ones. Other naturalists, or rather other dreamers, made these insects spring from the calices of sweet-scented flowers. Combined and separated in a certain manner, the flowers engendered bees. They said, further, that the bees sought on the blossoms of the olive trees and of the reed a seed which they rendered fit for the formation of their larvae.

All these fables, which sprang from the imagination of the ancients, were developed by a writer of the Renaissance, a certain Alexander de Montfort, author of a work entitled " Printemps de TAbeille." If we were to believe him, the king of the bees is formed of the juice which the workers extract from plants. These latter are created from honey; and the tyrants, i.e., the females, which do not manage to become sovereigns of a hive, are formed only of guin.

3l6 THE INSECT WORLD.

It will be seen that he had profited only too well by what he had read in Greek and Roman authors.

The bee was very much thought of in ancient Egypt, and is often represented on their monuments, above the sculptured ornaments which contain proper names, with two semicircles and a sort of sheaf, or fasciculus. Champollion Figeac thinks that this group, taken together, represents a title added to a proper name. According to Hor-ApoUon, another commentator on Egyptian hieroglyphics, the bee in the country of the Pharaohs was the emblem of a people sweetly submissive to the orders of its king. Nothing can be better than this comparison. It was for this reason, no doubt, that Napoleon I. sprinkled the symbolical bees over the imperial mantle which bears the arms of his dynasty. All the fables, all the hypotheses, spread about and cherished by the ancients respecting these industrious little insects, were dissipated in a moment when, by the invention of glass beehives, first made in the beginning of last century by Maraldi, a mathematician of Nice, we were enabled to observe their operations and habits. It is from this period only that our exact knowledge of the really wonderful life of these insects dates. Before Maraldi, the Dutch naturalist,

Swammerdam, had written an excellent " History of Bees." He died before he had published his work, and when, a long while after his death, it was at length printed, other investigators had already pushed on their observations further than he had. I'hanks to the invention of Maraldi, Reaumur, John Hunter, Schirach, and Francis Huber, had unveiled, by their admirable researches, the wonderful habits ol these insects. The discoveries of Francis Huber seem to be almost miraculous, when we remember that this observer was blind from the age of seventeen. Deprived of sight, Francis Huber did not the less wish to consecrate his life to the observation and the study of Nature. He caused the best works of his day on natural history and physics to be read to him, his usual reader being his servant, named Francis Burnens, a native of the Pays de Vaud. The honest Burnens took a singular interest in all he read, and showed by his judicious reflections the true talent of an observer, and Huber resolved to cultivate his talent. Very soon he could place implicit reliance on his companion, and see with another's eyes as if they were his own.

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