Seven Wise Masters
the most common title given to a famous mediæval collection of stories, grouped round a central story, the history of which is almost the most important among the problems of storiology.
Of variant versions there are two principal groups, the Eastern and the Western, the first including all the texts in Eastern languages, and some more or less free translations from Oriental texts; the other including the "Dolopathos," the "Historia Septem Sapientum," the "Erasto," and many others. The Oriental texts have so many elements in common that they obviously spring from one book. The Western texts, though derivable from the Eastern, show great divergencies alike in the fundamental story and in the tales inserted in it. The real cause of this is that in the Western cases oral tradition has transmuted the contents.
SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD, lateral saws which detach little splinters in ancient times, the Pyramids of Egypt, of wood and make a fibrous lid over the whole. In each fissure made by the piercer the female deposits from 10 to 20 eggs in pairs. It takes her a quarter of an hour to prepare one nest and fill it with eggs and she usually makes between 15 to 20 fissures in one limb. She lays between 400 and 500 eggs and then soon dies.
The perforations made in the limbs cause their death, and an orchard visited by seventeen-year locusts is ruined. Six weeks after the eggs are laid they hatch.
The young when it bursts the shell is of a yellowish white color except the eyes and the fore claws, which are reddish.
It is grublike in form and has six legs.
On the shoulders, where 17 years later the wings appear, are little protuberances and directly under the breast is a long beak for suction. After being hatched the young locusts loosen their hold on the limb and fall to the earth. They inthe Hanging Gardens of Semiramis at Babylon, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Statue of Jupiter at Athens by Phidias, the Mausoleum, the Colossus at Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria.
This cycle of seven wonders originated among the Greeks after the time of Alexander the Great, and they were described in a special work by Philo of Byzantium.