272 The supposed Auditory Powers 



danger, while daily experience shews us that sight has this 

 warning effect. Allow your hand to approach a fly, and this 

 assertion is proved. The power of hearing is not available 

 to the male in his search of the female, for we see the males 

 of our larger Lepidoptera, as Bombyx quercus, B. versicolor, 

 and Pavonia minor, when assiduously engaged in this pur- 

 suit, traversing the regions of air at a height where no sound 

 from the female could possibly reach them. Some other fa- 

 culty, perhaps wholly unknown to us, or, more probably, as 

 in many mammals, that of smell, may on these occasions be 

 their guide. The latter supposition offers no outrage to rea- 

 son or experience, and is abundantly supported by analogy. 

 Finally, the power of hearing is not available in obtaining 

 food, which, in all the Bombyces, longicorn beetles, and other 

 insects with very long antenna, is invariably inanimate, in- 

 ert, and silent. Preservation of the kind, therefore, accom- 

 plished conjointly by individual preservation, by reproduction 

 and its various consequent energies, or by the search of nu- 

 tritious and appropriate food, is found not to require this vast 

 auditory power. The question, then, remains unanswered, 

 and, unless we admit the truth, that it exists not, unanswerable. 

 Having thus stated my opinion as to what antennae are not, 

 it will perhaps be expected that I should also give an opinion 

 as to what they are ; but it appears to me that the true office 

 of antenna scarcely needs an enquiry. No one can study the 

 proceedings of bees in a glass hive, and observe that every 

 object is touched, and examined, and scrutinized, by the an- 

 tenna, without feeling an assurance that they are then in the 

 performance of their legitimate office as tactors ? Again, who 

 van watch the ant, who can observe the anxious scrutiny to 

 which she subjects every object before tasting it, or even be- 

 fore venturing to mount upon it, without being certain that 

 the antenna are her feelers or tactors ? Still more evident 

 is their occupation in the crickets, cockroaches, and a hun- 

 dred other tribes which shun the light, and make their jour- 

 neyings under cover of darkness. In these the antennae, as 

 tactors, are substitutes for eyes, and perform their office when 

 the latter are useless. This view of the subject bears inves- 

 tigation. We find that the grasshoppers, a sun-loving race, 

 closely allied to the crickets, neither require nor possess the 

 long thread-like antenna of their congeners ; on the contra- 

 ry, their antenna are short, erect, and apparently chiefly or- 

 namental. Flies and dragon-flies, which only affect the most 

 brilliant glare of light, are almost without antenna ; while 

 gnats and Phrygania, both lovers of the evening, have long 

 antenna; one genus of gnats, (Macrocera), which flies in 



