5. Louise Leneveux.
Les petits habitants des fleurs.
E. Lejeune, illustrator.
Paris: Mme. Vve. Louis Janet, ca. 1850.
When they swarm, grasshoppers are among the most destructive of all
insects (but only a small percentage of the many known species damage crops).
These delicately colored, fanciful illustrations of grasshoppers did not
appear in a work of fiction, but an introduction to
natural history in the form of conversations between members of a fictional
family. On the left, the illustrator has represented a plague of grasshoppers
as an army riding through a field. The text does
not identify the species in the illustration, but it looks as if it might
be a bow-winged
grasshopper.
On the right, the grasshopper is shown playing in an musical ensemble,
a charming way of reminding children that all of these insects make distinctive
chirps or sounds.
