274 POPULAR SCRIPTURE ZOOLOGY.

the Baptist while sojourning in the wilderness: “ And his
meat was locusts and wild honey.”

The grasshopper mentioned in various parts of the Bible
is supposed to be another species of locust, or to signify
merely that insect in its larva state. In Leviticus it is
named as an article of food, and this would apply to the
locust rather than the grasshopper, or might refer to the
larva of the former. In Ecclesiastes xii. the word again
occurs, in a striking description of the infirmities of age,
when even the grasshopper (or rather the locust, as being
the smallest article of food used by the Hebrews) “shall
be a burden.” Some authors, instead of “the grasshopper
shall be a burden,” would translate this passage, “the lo-
cust is a burden to itself,” thinking that the comparison
of an aged person to a locust is meant. Dr. Smith says,
“The dry, shrank, shrivelled, scraggy old man, his back-
bone sticking out, his knees projecting forward, his arms
backward, and his head downward, is not inaptly typified
by that insect ; and this is even still a common comparison
in the East. The idea appears to have been also familiar
to the classical ancients, for we find some engraved gems,
in which an emaciated old man is evidently represented by
a locust walking erect on its hind legs, and in which all