142 PROCEEDINGS ENTOMOLOGICAL, SOCIETY 



The student who undertakes a serious study of insect music 

 meets with many difficulties. In the first place, the notes of 

 many species are so similar that they can never be surely 

 identified until the insect itself has been examined. For this 

 reason no description of these, however careful, can ever be 

 specific. Again, insect stridulations cannot readily be pre- 

 served or successfully reproduced, so that the only alternative 

 is to depend upon a carefully trained memory and clear liter- 

 ary descriptions. It has been attempted to set the different 

 insect sounds to music, giving them the values of true musical 

 notes, but these efforts have been wholly inappropriate and 

 unsuccessful. One could reproduce the musical compositions 

 of Beethoven with the unmusical sounds of a taut string and 

 comb quite as accurately as he could reproduce the absolutely 

 unmusical and toneless stridulations of a katydid with the 

 tones of a musical instrument. 



A trained mind and a keen ear are essential to the student 

 who undertakes the recognition and identification of insect 

 notes in the field. While it may be true that the stridulations 

 of a few insects may not come within the limits of audition of 

 some ears, it is also true that many unaccustomed sounds are 

 at first unrecorded by processes within the mind itself. In 

 either case the effect is the same, so that these sounds prac- 

 tically do not exist for the listener. It follows that the in- 

 ability at first of some persons to detect new sounds pointed 

 out to them is no evidence whatever of really defective hearing. 



In the field, considerable practice is required before the 

 notes of a particular insect can readily be distinguished from 

 the general medley of noises attending the midsummer days 

 and nights. In order to distinguish the soft, lisping notes of 

 many insects from other sounds of the same character, as the 

 rustling of the wind in the grasses and foliage, a keen concen- 

 tration of the auditory and mental faculties must be gained, 

 which comes only with patient experience. At all times great 

 care must be exercised in order to determine, without mis- 

 take, the notes of any singer. Every unfamiliar note must 

 first be traced directly to the insect musician, which should 

 always be observed in the very act of singing to render the 

 identification of its notes unmistakably certain. Should the 

 notes cease during one's approach, the presence of an insect in 

 the vicinity is no evidence whatever that it was the musician. 

 Any attempt to identify by such methods the notes of Xiphi- 

 diums, Orchelimums, or crickets, which, at all times freely 

 intermingle in the grass and herbage, will result only in error 

 and confusion. 



