THE RATTLE. 309 



can best attract birds, are best fed.' In reply to this, a Mr. 

 J. W. Beal of Michigan affirmed that he hkd often mistaken 

 the sound for grasshoppers ; which educed many similar 

 accounts from persons who had been in danger of treading 

 on a Crotalus through 'inadvertent approach,' supposing 

 that only an insect were there. A child had taken it for 

 a cicada, some one else for a locust, etc. Any one who is 

 acquainted with the wild parts of the American Continent, 

 is familiar with the ceaseless chirps and whizzings of those 

 ubiquitous insects which are furnished with the stridulating 

 apparatus, and which lead you almost to expect to see 

 a scissors-grinder behind every tree. These are all the more 

 deceptive on account of their varying cadences, now louder, 

 now softer, approaching or receding, just as the sound of 

 the rattle varies by increased or less rapid vibrations, or 

 according to its individual size and strength. In a paper 

 read before the Zoological Society by Mr. A. R. Wallace 

 in 1 87 1, he invited attention to this fact of the resemblance 

 between the sound of the rattle and the singing of a cricket, 

 and that its use seemed to be to decoy insectivorous animals. 



Dr. Elliott Coues is also of this opinion, viz. that to an 

 unpractised ear the sound cannot be distinguished from 

 the crepitation of the large Western grasshopper. A case 

 has been reported, he tells us, of a bird observed to be drawn 

 within reach, thinking it was a grasshopper. Dr. Coues also 

 affirms that the sound has been heard when no perceptible 

 irritation disturbed the snake.^ 



Thus we see that the ' inadvertent intruder,' so far from 



^ From the Bulletin of the U. S. Geological Survey by Dr. Elliot Coues, 

 Appointed Surgeon and Naturalist to the Expedition, 1878. 



