148 PROCEEDINGS ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



seasons. Their music becomes a part of the poetry of the 

 summer time, and to understand it with sympathetic feelings 

 increases our appreciation of much of the happiest poetry of 

 our literature. 



It is possible that the Oriental mind is more responsive to 

 the touch of insect music. We are told by L,afcadio Hearn 

 and others that many ages ago the Japanese learned to appre- 

 ciate insect music. At the present time they cage and sell 

 many of their most musical katydids in order to hear their 

 varied calls as we cage birds for their songs. Hearn's peculiar 

 respect for inherited memories led him to feel that the Japa- 

 nese mind colored by the accumulated memories of many such 

 happy experiences must find ineffable beauty and charm in 

 the many musical crickets and locusts of that country. 



In our own country the stridulations of insects have re- 

 ceived but little attention. The notes of many species still 

 remain undescribed, yet in most instances it is almost as easy 

 to learn and to recognize different species by their notes as to 

 recognize different birds by their songs. In the South the 

 stridulations of insects have received but little attention. 

 Throughout this region the writer has spent many spare mo- 

 ments both night and day trying to trace each unfamiliar note 

 directly to the wings which produced it. Yet the work is 

 never finished, and hosts of unfamiliar sounds emanate from 

 inaccessible pines and oaks in every locality from early spring 

 till late autumn. For years the writer has been utterly balked 

 in his efforts to obtain even a glimpse of a number of these musi- 

 cal creatures. In some instances the season of song is exceed- 

 ingly brief. Notwithstanding these diffculties, each summer's 

 waiting and watching brings to light some new call which 

 ever afterward becomes a familiar greeting from the insect 

 which made it. The quest always allures toward the unseen 

 and unknown, so that the writer each recurring season finds 

 himself ever impelled to listen and to watch, ever hoping to 

 acquaint himself with the maker of those unseen mysterious 

 trills and chimes in the tree tops. 



CORRECTIONS. 

 BY H. L. VIERICK. 



Volume XIII, page 97, line 14, for "a" read "the preced- 

 ing;" page 98, line 25, for bridewelli read bridwelli. 



