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What causes the spry, fun-loving grasshopper, whose meanest trick is spitting "tobacco juice" on fishermen's fingers, to become the voracious, pillaging locust that every farmer hates & fears? Last week at Cornell University Dr. Jacobus Christian Faure announced that the same influence that turns a group of peaceful citizens into a crowd of bloodthirsty madmen also affects the grasshopper—mob psychology. In Pretoria, South Africa, Dr. Faure collected a lot of solitary grasshoppers. He picked all colors, brown, green, grey, soil-tinted and put them together in a cage. Soon they began to change shape and color. They became more active. Their body heat rose. Their appetites increased. In successive molts they continued to change color until all were black-&-yellow—the age-old color of plague locusts. No longer were they playful, harmless. They fought for food. They had become in every respect the thick-bodied, migratory, ravaging insect which is called a locust. A solitary grasshopper reared alone in a nearby cage caught the madness when put in with the rest. He too became a locust. Dr. Faure separated his locusts. In solitude, 135 out of 139 reverted into harmless grasshoppers. Armed with his knowledge, he went last week to Minnesota to try to work a metamorphosis on the Northwest's grasshopper-locust swarms.
* No kin to the U. S. kangaroo-rat, which is no marsupial, but a jumping rodent.