The Savoyan jurist, Gaspard Bailly, in the second part of the disquisition entitled _Traité des Monitoires_, already mentioned, treats “Of the Excellence of Monitories” and discusses the main points touching the criminal prosecution and punishment of insects. He begins by saying that “one should not contemn monitories (a general term for anathemas, bans and excommunications), seeing that they are matters of great importance, inasmuch as they bear with them the deadliest sword, wielded by our holy mother, the Church, to wit, the power of excommunication, which cutteth the dry wood and the green, sparing neither the quick nor the dead, and smiting not only rational beings, but turning its edge also against irrational creatures; since it hath been shown at sundry times and in divers places, that worms and insects, which were devouring the fruits of the earth, have been excommunicated and, in obedience to the commands of the Church, have withdrawn from the cultivated fields to the places prescribed by the bishop who had been appointed to adjudge and to adjure them.” M. Bailly then cites numerous instances of this kind, in which a writer on logic would find ample illustrations of the fallacy known as _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_. Thus in the latter half of the fifteenth century, during the reign of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, a plague of locusts threatened the province of Mantua in Northern Italy with famine, but were dispersed by excommunication. He quotes some florid lines from the poet Altiat descriptive of these devastating swarms, which “came, after so many other woes, under the leadership of Eurus (_i.e._ brought by the east wind), more destructive than the hordes of Attila or the camps of Corsicans, devouring the hay, the millet and the corn, and leaving only vain wishes, where the hopes of August stood.” Again in 1541, a cloud of locusts fell upon Lombardy, and by destroying the crops, caused many persons to perish with hunger. These insects “were as long as a man’s finger, with large heads and bellies filled with vileness; and when dead they infected the air and gave forth a stench, which even carrion kites and carnivorous beasts could not endure.” Another instance is given, in which swarms of four-winged insects came from Tartary, identified in the popular mind with Tartarus, obscuring the sun in their flight and covering the plains of Poland a cubit deep. In the year 1338, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, these creatures began to devastate the region round Botzen in the Tyrol, consuming the crops and laying eggs and leaving a numerous progeny, which seemed destined to continue the work of destruction indefinitely. A prosecution was therefore instituted against them before the ecclesiastical court at Kaltern, a large market-town about ten miles south of Botzen, then as now famous for its wines, and the parish priest instructed to proceed against them with the sentence of excommunication in accordance with the verdict of the tribunal.