However, there is no doubt that these insects, in relation to man, have played what the Germans call “_eine bedeutende Rolle_” in the world, and are worth saying something about, if only one has something not too desperately antique to say, and this, by virtue of a work which I, at any rate, have never seen quoted, and a paper in a certain Antipodean organ, which for the majority of people here might as well be in the _Faerie Queene_ or _Paradise Lost_, I think I may have. But first let us turn to what, though it be antique, is also classical, and—though this would not be a corollary for everyone—very delightful: “To look,” say the authors of the famous _Introduction_, “at a locust in a cabinet of insects, you would not, at first sight, deem it capable of being the source of so much evil to mankind as stands on record against it. ‘This is but a small creature,’ you would say, ‘and the mischief which it causes cannot be far beyond the proportion of its bulk. The locusts so celebrated in history must surely be of the Indian kind mentioned by Pliny, which were three feet in length, with legs so strong that the women used them as saws. I see, indeed, some resemblance to the horse’s head, but where are the eyes of the elephant, the neck of the bull, the horns of the stag, the chest of the lion, the belly of the scorpion, the wings of the eagle, the thighs of the camel, the legs of the ostrich, and the tail of the serpent, all of which the Arabians mention as attributes of this widely dreaded insect destroyer, but of which, in the insect before me, I discern little or no likeness?’” Personally, I do not for a moment imagine that even in 1815, the date of the first edition of the work in question, any reasonably educated person would have spoken or thought in this way, without any conception, apparently, of what numbers can effect, but it is interesting to know what the Arabs think, or say, about the locust, and especially that they represent it—as we are told a few lines on—as thus addressing Mahomet: “We are the army of the Great God; we produce ninety-nine eggs; if the hundred were completed, we should consume the whole earth and all that is in it.”