GRYLLUS CAMPESTRIS. 137 



narrow, of a yellow colour, and covered with a very tough skin. . . . 



" . . . [But] a pliant stalk of grass, gently insinuated into the 

 caverns, will probe their windings to the bottom, and quickly bring- 

 out the inhabitant. ... It is remarkable that, though these insects 

 are furnished with long legs behind, and brawny thighs for leaping, 

 like grasshoppers ; yet when driven from their holes they show no 

 activity, but crawl along in a shiftless manner, so as easily to be taken ; 

 and again, though provided with a curious apparatus of wings, yet they 

 never exert them when there seems to be the greatest occasion. The 

 males only make that shrilling noise ; ... it is raised by a brisk 

 friction of one wing against the other. They are solitary beings, living 

 singly male or female, each as it may happen; . . . the wings 

 may be useful perhaps during the hours of night. When the males 

 meet they will fight fiercely. . . . With their strong jaws, toothed 

 like the shears of a lobster's claws, they perforate and round their 

 curious regular cells, having no fore- claws to dig, like the mole-cricket. 

 . . . Of such herbs as grow before the mouths of their burrows they 

 eat indiscriminately ; and on a little platform, which they make just by, 

 they drop their dung ; and never, in the day time, seem to stir more than 

 two or three inches from home. Sitting in the entrance of their caverns 

 they chirp all night as well as day from the middle of the month of 

 May to the middle of July ; and in hot weather, when they are most 

 vigorous, they make the hills echo ; and, in the stiller hours of darkness, 

 may be heard to a considerable distance. In the beginning of the 

 season their notes are more faint and inward ; but become louder as 

 the summer advances, and so die away again by degrees. . . . The 

 shrilling of the field-cricket, though sharp and stridulous, yet mar- 

 vellously delights some hearers, filling their minds with a train of 

 summer ideas of everything that is rural, verdurous, and joyous. 



" About the 10th March the crickets appear at the mouths of their 

 cells, which they then open and bore, and shape very elegantly. All 

 that ever I have seen at that season were in their pupa state, and had 

 only the rudiments of wings, lying under a skin or coat, which must 

 be cast before the insect can arrive at its perfect state ; from whence 

 I should suppose that the old ones of last year do not always survive 

 the winter. In August their holes begin to be obliterated, and the 

 insects are seen no more till spring. . . 



" One of these crickets, when confined in a paper cage and set in the 

 sun, and supplied with plants moistened with water, will feed and thrive, 

 and become so merry and loud as to be irksome in the same room where 

 a person is sitting; if the plants are not wetted it will die." (Gilbert 

 White, 1789.) 



In Italy these crickets are kept in little wicker- 

 cages for the sake of their song, in much the same 

 way as Gilbert White kept them. To a meeting of 

 the Entom. Soc. of London, 21 October 1896, AY. B. 

 Spence sent from Florence for exhibition specimens 

 in such cages. He stated that they were sold by the 

 Italians on Ascension Day in accordance with an 

 ancient custom. The Eev. A. E. Eaton says that in 

 Lisbon and Oporto male field-crickets are sold in 



