MUSICAL INSECTS. 681 



ring, and which, when the vocal cords begin to vibrate, vibrates 

 with them and serves as a resonance apparatus. Although there 

 is no real voice^ which with us is inseparable from a mouth, we 

 can say that the cicada comes nearest among insects to having 

 such a gift There is a curious relative of our cicada in America, 

 which in its larval condition exhibits a phenomenon that nothing 

 else is like. The larva lives in that form fully seventeen years 

 under ground before it assumes the shape of a perfect insect. It 

 has been called by the characteristic name of the seventeen-year 

 locust. The voice of this locust was heard on board the Beagle, 

 in which Darwin made his famous voyage, an English mile off. 

 Its song is essentially a trill of the treble E with D sharp, then a 

 run down the chromatic scale and rapidly up again, about such a 

 strain as one would play if he slipped his finger up and down the 

 string of a violin while drawing the bow over it. The musical 

 reader may gain from the following an idea of the talent as a 

 composer, and of the song of this locust : 



Allegro. 



gg gjjgilg 



With most musical insects there is no special apparatus for 

 the production of tones. They simply combine the useful with 

 the agreeable. The wings that bear them through the air also 

 make the sound-waves. The only remarkable thing is, that the 

 flying-tones thus produced are so different in single kind. The 

 wings of the bee, for example, vibrate four hundred and forty 

 times in a second the same number of vibrations as in our nor- 

 mal tone ; it is the music-master, and is the cleverest and best 

 esteemed of insects. In other bees, as the female bumble-bee, the 

 wings vibrate eight hundred and seventy times in a second, and 

 sound the treble A, an octave higher than the bee. Marey, who 

 has succeeded in photographing the flight of birds, has also found 

 an ingenious method of determining the number of vibrations of 

 insects' wings. He fixed a fly so that the extreme tip of its wing 

 touched a soot - blackened cylinder, which could be turned by 

 clock-work upon its axis. Every stroke of the wing made a faint 

 but perceptible mark, by means of which Marey was able to deter- 

 mine that the fly made three hundred and thirty wing-beats in a 

 second. 



As we sit at night by the lamp, there arises suddenly a loud 

 humming tone, alternately swelling to considerable strength and 

 diminishing till it is barely heard, until the musician, a large blue- 

 bottle fly, to our annoyance darts humming against our cheek or 

 hand, or precipitates himself into the lamp. Every reader has 



