Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/47

 increased size of the antennae, legs, and wings causes them to be compressed in the narrow space between the new and the old cuticula, and, when the latter is cast off, the crumpled appendages expand to their full size. The observer then gets the impression that he is witnessing a sudden transformation. The impression, however, is a false one; what is really going on is comparable with the display of new dresses and coats that the merchant puts into his show windows at the proper season for their use, which he has just unpacked from their cases but which were produced in the factories long before.

The adult grasshoppers lead prosaic lives, but, like a great many good people, they fill the places allotted to them in the world, and see to it that there will be other occupants of their own kind for these same places when they themselves are forced to vacate. If they seldom fly high, it is because it is not the nature of locusts to do so; and if, in the East, one does sometimes soar above his fellows, he accomplishes nothing, unless he happens to land on the upper regions of a Manhattan skyscraper, when he may attain the glory of a newspaper mention of his exploit—most likely, though, with his name spelled wrong.

On the other hand, like all common folk born to obscurity and enduring impotency as individuals, the grasshopper in masses of his kind becomes a formidable creature. Plagues of locusts are of historic renown in countries south of the Mediterranean, and even in our own country hordes of grasshoppers known as the Rocky Mountain locust did such damage at one time in the States of the Middle West that the government sent out a commission of entomologists to investigate them. This was in the years following the Civil War, when, for some reason, the locusts that normaily inhabited the Northwest, east of the Rocky Mountains, became dissatisfied with their usual breeding grounds and migrated in great swarms into the States of the Mississippi valley, where they brought destruction to