110 JOURNEY FROM much as they received their name from thence.” — He further adds — “ The axihg, which St. John the Baptist fed upon in the wilderness, were properly locusts ; and provided they appeared in the holy land during the spring, as they did in Barbary, it may be presumed that St. John entered upon his mission, and that the da of his sheicing himself unto Israel (Luke i. 20) was at that season Pliny has informed us that the locusts lay their eggs in autumn, which remain all the winter in the fissures of the earth, and come forth in the shape of locusts in the following spring ; being, at first, without legs, and obliged to creep upon their wings. He tells us that they invaribly choose tracts of level country in which to deposit their eggs, as being most full of crevices and fissures, and hence, if it chance to be a rainy season, the eggs never come to perfection ; but, on the contrary, if the early part of the year should be dry, vast numbers of these insects may be expected in the summer ensuing.

Some writers (he adds) are of opinion that locusts breed ticice in the year, and that they perish as often ; the first supply dying in the heat of the summer, and the second immediately succeeding them. The mothers die as soon as they have brought forth their young, by reason of a small worm which breeds about the throat, and ultimately chokes them. The same author informs us that it is said there are locusts in India so much as three feet in length ; and that the people of the * The time when we observed the swarm of locusts alluded to above, was In the latter end of November ; their course, as Dr. Shaw has remarked, was, however, invariably towards the sea, in which myriads of them were lost ; and we have never seen a single instance, on other occasions, where they did not take that direction, however far they might have been inland.