MUSICAL INSECTS. 



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sects, too, execute vocal music ? The answer is simple : no insect 

 has what we in the proper sense call a voice. They produce their 

 music either like our bumble-bee, by the mere vibration of their 

 wings, or they have some special apparatus which they adapt to 

 musical efforts, the peculiarities of which we are about to learn 

 from some of them. 



As we continue our walk, our feet, treading down the grass, 

 cause a lively disturbance, like that which Gulliver raised among 

 the Lilliputians. Every sort of frightened thing, large and small, 

 hops up and down in front of us, behind us, to the right and left. 

 But, out of the confusion of sounds that accompany the disturb- 

 ance, there strikes upon us, over-sounding all,, a sharp rattling 

 every child knows the musician the green jumper of the mead- 

 ows, the grasshopper. What is the instrument that this animal 

 plays upon ? The grasshopper is a real fiddler. To satisfy our- 

 selves of this, we have only to catch one and examine him closely, 

 to find that he carries the instrument on which he plays upon his 

 thigh. In our picture (Fig. 1) the inner side of the grasshopper's 

 thigh is represented as turned toward us, and over it is drawn a 

 curious skin. If we bring a section of this skin under a microscope 



Fig. 1. Grasshopper's Leg (magni- 

 fied three times). 



Fig. 2. Toothed Skin of the Grasshopper's Leg 

 (magnified one hundred times). 



magnifying about a hundred times, we shall perceive that the 

 cellular tissue of which it consists is furnished with several small 

 teeth (Fig. 2). They are not much longer than a hair is thick, but 

 there are eighty or ninety of them. This system is the grasshop- 

 per's fiddle-bow. The insect has other peculiar formations on each 

 wing ; these, however, have no teeth, but are even, and project as 

 an edging along the wing. When the grasshopper would make 

 music, he rubs his fiddle-bow rapidly backward and forward over 

 this process, and there arises the well-known rattling sound, such 

 as one can produce with a bow upon loosely strung violin-strings. 

 The tone, which is strengthened by the action of the wing as a 

 resonance membrane, is not the same with every individual. We 

 hear, sometimes the first, sometimes the second violin, sometimes 

 the bass-viol ; and Handel seems to have had the last especially 

 in his mind when, in his Oratorio, Israel in Egyjjt, he attempted 



