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 grasshopper 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 worship of our boys and girls. [Illustration] A BABY GRASSHOPPER A baby creature, scarcely two weeks since it issued from a grasshopper 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, pushing its way among the blades of grass, 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 eggshell and must work its way out alone, but the young grasshoppers 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 butterflies, which spring full-fledged from the metamorphosis of a caterpillar, the grasshopper 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 grasshopper is essentially a small, wingless adult, and not a grub or larva in the ordinary sense. [Illustration] A YOUNG GRASSHOPPER'S SKELETON When the young grasshopper emerges from the egg, it is very small indeed--a wingless, helpless little creature, all legs and mouth.