With native labour, the above system, which has been so entirely successful in Cyprus, could, Dr. Munro makes no doubt, be put in operation in Africa; but Mr. W. W. Froggatt, the Government entomologist of Australia, does not think it adapted for that country. Writing in _The Agricultural Gazette_ of New South Wales (March, 1901), Mr. Froggatt says, “Though they have been successfully dealt with in Cyprus, Egypt, Algeria, and India by means of trenches, traps, and burning in the hopper state, and digging up and destroying the eggs in the earlier stage, in nearly all cases the areas infested were comparatively small; the labour employed was so cheap that small armies of natives could be employed at a small cost to destroy them, while in several instances an autocratic government made the natives, whether they were inclined or not, work at their plan of destruction.” In Australia, where, “whether they were inclined or not,” the natives have been got rid of, very much as though they were locusts—or some less stubborn insects—themselves, this would not do. It was in the summer of 1899 that Mr. Froggatt, in consequence of reports received of the advent of locusts in various parts of the country, left Sydney for Condobolin. On the way there many “mobs”—to use the Australian word—were encountered, and numbers of locusts flew in at the railway carriage windows. Upon alighting, Mr. Froggatt became the witness of a very interesting spectacle—a ceremony, as it may well be called, in which vast numbers of the insects were engaged—of which he gives the following description:— “In the open red soil we found them laying their eggs in thousands, and the operation was very remarkable. The female set to work by pressing the tip of her abdomen into the soil, and working the plates at the apex, so that she gradually bored a regular circular shaft, slightly over an inch in depth and under a quarter of an inch in diameter, the segments of the abdomen extending and stretching as the work progressed. But the most extraordinary part of the operation was that each female, while boring the chamber to deposit the eggs, was attended by two males, each of which rested his head against hers, with his antennas resting over her head, and the inner foreleg clasped over the prothorax behind the base of the head. Resting like this, with the tails of the two attendant males pointing outwards, the three formed a three-rayed star. Wherever the business of egg-laying was going on, each female and her attendants were surrounded by a cluster of admiring males, averaging from thirty to fifty in number, generally in bunches of fours or fives, forming an irregular ring round them, but separated from her by a clear space of three or four inches. In no instance were there ever more than two males touching the female, though we examined thousands of them at work.”[24]