Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/552

536 prepared by the Western farmers for use upon the Atlantic and Pacific fishing-grounds. A very important chemical substance used in the arts may be extracted from locusts by the action of sulphuric acid. This is formic acid, for which many applications have been found in therapeutics and in the laboratory. By collecting, killing, and burying them in trenches, or in compost-heaps, these insects might be utilized as fertilizing agents, or they might be collected in large quantities, dried, and sent East in bales as food for poultry.

Although the writer does not profess to be an advocate of entomophagy, nor does he intend to become an acridophagist himself, unless absolutely necessary, yet he believes, with Professor Riley, that, when the devastations of the Rocky Mountain locusts lay waste our Western domain, the inhabitants of these regions need not die for want of food so long as a supply of locusts exists. Persons should not allow prejudice and squeamishness to stand in the way of self-preservation.



LONG the New Hampshire sea-coast, in the towns of Rye and North Hampton, stretches a curious and massive formation, which at first sight appears as if built at enormous expenditure of time and labor. On closer examination, however, it proves to be only one of Ocean's eccentric freaks, executed in this case with almost human intelligence and care.

A sea-wall, compactly formed of water-worn pebbles of all sizes, shapes, and materials, runs along the beach for about six miles, here and there broken by rocky points and little inlets, somewhat modified by its situation, but preserving with astonishing regularity several remarkable features. In places it is so high and wide that one can hardly believe it anything but a carefully constructed dike, designed to shelter the adjoining fields. Along part of its extent, where it separates the ocean from an extensive salt-marsh, it is utilized by the farmers of the neighborhood for a cart-road. Along another stretch, a plank-walk surmounts it for half a mile.

It first appears in the form of a low wall composed of three terraces, near Little Boar's Head, in the town of North Hampton, thirty rods south of the slight projection known on the charts as Fox Hill Point. This portion of the wall is only about twenty rods in length, and seems much like a stone facing to the steep beach ward slope. Some forty rods north of the point it reappears, this time in the form of a large and compact dike, and extends along the water-line in a crescent form for at least fifty rods, terminating at a small cove directly east of 