There is no vanity at all in my thinking that this has been an interesting account of locusts, since I myself have had nothing to do with it. In giving a general description, from general reading, of things generally known, and that have been described scores of times before, one is entitled to use one’s own language, and to think, perhaps, that one stands at no particular disadvantage in doing so. But when, in regard to something specially curious or interesting, the graphic words of an eye-witness are before one, the best thing one can do, in my opinion, is to copy them out. If it be suggested that this is but a lazy way of writing a book, my reply is that a compiler best shows his industry in the searching out of material. The late Professor Romanes was alive to this fact, and has left us in consequence his _Animal Intelligence_—one of the most interesting books that exist, in my opinion—about one-eighth of which, or perhaps a little more, is written by himself. ----- Footnote 21: Dr. Æneas Munro, The Locust Plague and its Suppression. Footnote 22: The Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales, March, 1900. Footnote 23: Dr. Æneas Munro, The Locust Plague and its Suppression. Footnote 24: The Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales, March, 1900. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VIII Locusts and _locustidæ_—The most musical grasshoppers—Katydid concerts—A much-resembling note—Cricket thermometers—Cicadas and sounding-boards—Admired musicians—An appreciative audience. LOCUSTS, as everybody knows, belong to the grasshopper family, but it may surprise some who have read the grumblings of the learned over popular names—white ants, hedge-sparrows, etc.—to find that entomologists have so managed matters that they do not belong to the _locustidæ_—which is one of the two groups into which all grasshoppers are divided—but to the other group. There are long-horned grasshoppers and short-horned grasshoppers. The long-horned ones, which are not locusts, are all of them _locustidæ_, but none of the _locustidæ_ are locusts, because locusts have short horns. Entomologists think it would be absurd to alter this, after it has gone on so long, a view in which ornithologists, with their _storm_-petrels and hedge-_accentors_, no doubt agree with them. A mere popular name, with its roots in the Saxon or Celtic, can be changed, and there an end, but scientific nonsense, in Latin, and begun by Linnæus, as is generally the case, let no man presume to meddle with.