Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 June 1885 — An Army Routed by Locusts. [ARTICLE]

An Army Routed by Locusts.

Of al) destructive foes none are more dreaded in most eastern lands than the locusts, whoso dire visitations may well be deemed national calamities. In point of fact, the lands which are exempt from their occasional presence are the favored few. A very few details- of their invasion of Southern Russia in the years 1879 and 1880, will give us some idea or their multitude. They fell upon the province of Caucasus, utterly destroying vineyards and gardens, blockading the streets so that traffic was suspended, filling the ovens so that for several days baking was quite out of the question, and so choking the water courses that not a cup of water could be drunk until filtered. In Georgia they fairly routed a detachment of Russian troops, who, not liking to turn aside on their march repelled by mere insets attempted to fate the locust army, although reports said it covered twenty square miles of the country. So the " soldiers advanced, but soon found themselves literally covered by the clinging, creeping insects, which crawled all over them, until finally the men fairly turned and fled, slipping and sliding as they ran over the crushed and oily bodies of their martyred foes. For forty-eight hours they were detained, taking refuge in a village, and assisting the inhabitants to kill millions of the invaders, whose corpses they carted off to manure the fields, which, however, were in the meantime stripped of every blade of grass or corn, and the trees shorn of every green leaf. . .. . --tt—

On the road from Tiflis to Poti the locusts lay so thick on the lino that the trains were obstructed. Large districts of Southern Russia were swept as brre of all vegetation as if afire had raged over the land, and hundreds of peasants, utterly beggared, abandoned their homes to seek bread wherever it might be found. In the provinoe of Chersom alone, 50,000 roubles was voted by Government for expenditure in the effort to free the land of this plague; in another district 20,000 persons were employed daily for three months in the same work; the Govern ment expenditure on the whole organization was estimated at 200,000 roubles, without any calculation of the loss on crops of all descriptions. Another scehe of locust plague was Algeria in the year 1866, when the damage done by these insects was estimated at 50,000,000 francs, and resulted in a famine so appalling that 200,000 natives died of starvation”— All the Year Hound.