[79] "And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left; and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt."--EXOD. x. 13-15. They ate up all the herbs of the field and all the fruit of the trees which the hail (the seventh plague) had left. A west wind swept them away again, when Pharaoh had at last promised to allow the children of Israel to depart. [Illustration: VIII. A Cloud of Locusts in Algeria.] Pliny relates that in many places in Greece a law obliged the inhabitants to wage war against the locusts three times a year; that is to say, in their three states of egg, larva, and adult. In the Isle of Lemnos the citizens had to pay as taxes so many measures of locusts. In the year 170 before our era they devastated the environs of Capua. In the year of our Lord 181 they committed great ravages in the north of Italy and in Gaul. In 1690 locusts arrived in Poland and Lithuania by three different ways, and, as it were, in three different bodies. "They were to be found in certain places where they had died," writes the Abbé Ussaris, an eye-witness, "lying on one another in heaps of four feet in height. Those which were alive, perched upon the trees, bending their branches to the ground, so great was their number. The people thought that they had Hebrew letters on their wings. A rabbi professed to be able to read on them words which signified God's wrath. The rains killed these insects: they infected the air; and the cattle, which ate them in the grass, died immediately."