THE LANGUAGE OF ANTS 



the fields from Avon to her cottage gate, and saw the 

 busy workers, like raiding soldiers, 



"Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds; 

 The singing masons building roofs of gold." 



Gardner, an English writer on the Music of Nature 

 (1832), makes the curious statement that he was once 

 in the gallery of the Royal Exchange to view the money- 

 dealers in the court below. He was struck not only by 

 the likeness of the scene to the interior of a beehive, 

 but by the similarity of the sound, the buzz of the two 

 thousand voices being perceptibly amalgamated into the 

 "key of F." This is the key, the author concluded, to 

 which the most prevalent sounds of nature may be re- 

 ferred a fact by which musicians have unconsciously 

 been influenced; for scarcely an ancient composition ap- 

 pears in any other key, except its relative minor, for 

 the first hundred years of the art. In Queen Elizabeth's 

 Virginal Book of four hundred folio pages nearly all the 

 pieces are confined to this key. There is not an instance 

 of a sharp being placed at the clef. 1 



According to the same author, the house-fly and the 

 honey-bee hum in F on the first space. The bumble- 

 bee, the contra-basso of the tribe, performs the same 

 note, but an octave lower. The present writer is able 

 to confirm this conclusion only in part. F seems to 

 him to be a nearly true note for the common fly as 

 tested by his ear, unaided by an instrument. But the 

 wing-note of bees and the general tone of a large mis- 

 cellaneous company of insects humming above a bed 

 of flowers hydrangeas, for example seemed to him 



1 I have not the opportunity to verify this statement, which I 

 make on Gardner's authority. 



131 



