156 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



been known to the ancient Greeks, for one of their inisogynistic cynics 

 embodied it in the oft-quoted couplet : 



Happy the cicada lives, 



For they ail have voiceless wives. 



The common annual "dog-day" or "harvest fly" emerges from 

 the ground early in July, generally during the night. The winged in- 

 sect as soon as developed seeks the tree-tops, leaving the empty pupa 

 shell clinging to the trunk. A few days generally elapse before the 

 wings and drums are sufficiently hardened to admit of use, and it is 

 quite amusing on warm, still afternoons to hear the soft tentative efforts 

 of the little drummers apparently trying their instruments. 



After a few hot, dry days, however, we are liable to be startled late 

 in the afternoon by a reverberating burst of music from the tree-tops 

 round about. Beginning quite slowly and softly, the vibrations quicken 

 and intensify until we are fain to muffle our ears against the prolonged 

 and deafening whirr. Sometimes several will drum in chorus, at other 

 times the notes will be taken up like the parts to a fugue, and again 

 one solo performance will follow another, the vibrations diminishing 

 gradually and the sound slowly dying away in a soft, descending note 

 expressive of exhausted effort. These concerts are given gratuitously 

 every afternoon and early evening for about six weeks. 



At long intervals — so long that human life seldom includes more 

 than four or five of them — the unique and interesting 17 or 13-year spe- 

 cies appears upon the scene. This is a North American insect, and in 

 many respects the most peculiar entomological production of our grand 

 division of the earth. 



The larvte, when first hatched from eggs laid in the twigs of trees, 

 to the great disfigurement of the latter, are only about one-fifteenth of 

 an inch long, snow-white, and so imponderable that they trust them- 

 selves fearlessly to the breezes to bear them to the earth. Into the 

 earth they at once make their way and begin their long, subterranean 

 existence. Deeper and deeper they descend as year by year passes 

 over them. A very little nourishment suffices for their slow growth, 

 and their slight tapping of the roots of forest or orchard trees seldom 

 results in perceptible injury to the latter. Owing to their concealed 

 life it has been impossible to ascertain the number of moults which 

 they undergo, but these are probably, as in all long-lived insects, very 

 many. 



In the more nothern States after nearly seventeen years of under- 

 ground life, they are moved by a mysterious impulse to begin their 

 ascent. Kesting a short distance below the surface, they discard their 

 last larval skin and assume a form more fitted to encounter the changed 



