Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 60, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1919 — 17-YEAR LOCUSTS TO VISIT INDIANA BY LAST OF MAY [ARTICLE]

17-YEAR LOCUSTS TO VISIT INDIANA BY LAST OF MAY

Washington, March 12.—The department of agriculture sounds the warning—an avalanche of locusts may be expected during the last week in May. The seventeen-year locusts and thirteen-year locusts are all turning over in their shells for a last nap under ground preparatory to combined activity this summer. The seventeen-year locusts, or Brood Ten, as they are scientifically known, are by far the larger family, and the more widely scattered. For seventeen years these locusts, millions of them, have slept peacefully in the ground exactly where they buried themselves. But by the last of May, 1919, the will have completed their seventeen-year growth. They will then burst their shells and come out to try their voices in their wellknown heat song. The seventeen-year locust is not a locust at all; it is a homopterous hemipterous insect, or more popularly, a cicada. Use of the name cicada seems to be confined chiefly to scientists and agriculturists, and that one jesting employe of the department of agriculture cheerfully and unscientifically calls it a “periodical chicadee.” To the laymen, however, the cicades will always be locusts, or sometimes “those infernal locusts.” The cicada bears on his wings a well-defiined letter W. This has been seized upon as a clue by those who attach "a deeper meaning to the sev-enteen-year sleep of the locust than to the shorter nap of the caterpillar. These sages at one time decided that the W stood for war, and ithat the appearance of the swarm of locusts brought woe and distress, even as the days of Pharoh and the plague of the locusts. Possibly the prophets will still maintain that the seventeen-year locust is a forerunner of war. The more cheerful seers will probably associate the W on the 1919 locust with wealth as a portent of national prosperity.