576 ANNUAL EErORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



good are crickets and katydids, and I replied, to insjDire a finer 

 poetry and philosophy in the souls of men than we now know. Long 

 after our mechanical madness shall have worn off and our age of 

 hurry and mechanistic musing has been forgotten, the crickets and 

 katydids will bespeak the same rare and refined poetry to those who 

 shall pause to feel and interpret it in terms of the human soitl. What 

 I love about these great fellows is their leisurely way of expressing 

 themselves hour after hour in two or three simple rasping accents, 

 as harsh and as grating near at hand as any insect note on earth, 

 perchance. There is no hint of the machine-like expenditure of 

 energy such as the big conehead, N eoconocephalus rohustus^ drones 

 out with all the speed its body can command to drive the scraper 

 over the file vein. As with nearly all of the larger katydids, each 

 syllable is the result of a single forward stroke of the scraper over 

 the file vein. The big true katydid has even given up active flying, it 

 would seem, and has reduced its notes to comparatively few leisurely 

 deliveries per minute, perhaps 20 or 25 phrases, each one involving 

 only 2 or 3 strokes of the scraper upon the big file vein. It would 

 appear as if the big fellows were tending toward some lethargic 

 condition, where as little expenditure of energy as possible must be 

 made to send its song to the ears of its fellows in some mood of 

 social companionship that the forces back of its life demand. 

 Caudell first reported that the female of this species, when handled, 

 also stridulated somewhat like the males, and I also have observed 

 this habit with this katydid. At the time Caudell wrote he did not 

 know whether or not the sounds were ever emitted in nature volun- 

 tarily. I may state that I have found the females of other species 

 of katydids emitting characteristic call notes of their own accord 

 out of doors. These call notes appear to be of the nature of true 

 sex calls or invitations to the males, for a number of these in every 

 instance at once congregated about her, some of them flying from 

 the shrubbery around. I have observed this behavior in females of 

 one of the bush katydids, Phanerofteva curvicauda^ the round- 

 winged katydid, Atnblycorypha rotundifolia^ and the larger angular- 

 winged katydid, Microcentrum rhomhifolium. According to W. J. 

 Baumgartner, the females of our common mole cricket, Gryllotal/pa 

 hexadactyla^ have a rather loud distinct chirp, used as a note of rec- 

 ognition in their dark burrows. The females of a Porto Rican 

 species, Scapteriscus didactylus, are said also to possess poorly devel- 

 oped stridulatory organs, and probably call or stridulate in some 

 manner. It would seem that some of the females of our own musical 

 insects are inclined to the moods of art as well as the males, a tend- 

 ency which has become highly developed in some exotic species. 



