Page:Notes on New Zealand (1892).pdf/70

60 spread themselves over the doomed land, and dropping like rain in myriads upon the fields and pastures and cultivated tracts, utterly consume everything with which they come in contact. Tribes of grasshoppers, moreover, closely resembling locusts in many respects, commit similar devastation. The locust and grasshopper plagues in Australia, in fact, assume very serious proportions, and it is questionable whether they or the rabbits inflict the greater injury upon the farmers. It is true that in one or two districts of New Zealand also the rabbits have to be reckoned with, but in the latter country