Some writers (he adds) are of opinion that locusts breed _twice_ 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 country use their legs and thighs for saws, after they are properly dried! Pliny mentions, at the same time, their flight across the sea, over which they are carried by the wind, and where they usually fall, and perish in heaps; although this is not always of necessity the case, as early writers (he says) have remarked, because their wings are wet with the dew; for they have been known to pass over extensive tracts of sea, and will continue their flight for many days without rest. Locusts, he adds, are gifted with the power of foreseeing an approaching famine, and will take the precaution, on such an occasion, of transporting themselves into distant countries. He mentions also the noise which they make with their wings, and that they are sometimes mistaken for flights of strange birds: that they darken the sun in their flight, as if a heavy cloud had passed before it, and spread terror and consternation wherever they make their appearance; eating up everything which comes in their way, and even gnawing the very doors of the houses. Italy, on this writer’s authority, was so much infested with locusts from the opposite shores of Africa, that the people of Rome, alarmed at the idea of their producing a famine, had been often obliged to consult the books of the Sibyls, to discover by what means they might avert the wrath of the gods which they considered to be falling upon them. He tells us that in the Cyrenaica there existed a law, obliging the inhabitants, every third year, to wage a regular war with the locusts: on such occasions they were ordered to seek out their nests, to destroy the eggs and the young, and afterwards to proceed to extirpate such as had already come to maturity. A heavy punishment, at the same time, was inflicted upon those who neglected this useful precaution, as though they had been guilty of an unpardonable crime against their sovereign and their country. In Lemnos, also, there was a measure established to regulate the quantity which each man should kill; and every person was obliged to give in his account to the magistrate, and to produce his measure full of dead locusts[24].