586 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 2 8 



eternally works in the direction of physiological distinctiveness as 

 well as in that of morphological distinctiveness. 



Other field naturalists, including Fulton in his studies of the 

 Oecanthus group, have noted these facile physiological variations. 

 Why one group should become so readily standardized within its 

 environment as to stridulate with a vernacular of its own is difficult 

 to see. It is true that the time relations more than anything else 

 appear to be involved in the dissimilar habits of stridulation. The 

 chirp of the cricket is merely a frequent sectioning of the continuous 

 trill into more or less uniform patterns, and the single-stroke note 

 is but an extreme slowing down of the rapid and continuous wing 

 movement which produces the quavering trill. What leads to the 

 final, rigid adoption of these measures and intervals is not always 

 clear. One may say, however, that the less one knows of life the 

 simpler it appears in its manifestations, and the more one concen- 

 trates his attentions upon its actualities and potentialities in the 

 finer magnitudes of its expressions the more complex do its corre- 

 lations appear. 



With much confidence we speak of the vernaculars of men and 

 claim to recognize with no great difficulty the New Englander from 

 the South Carolinian or the Kansan. There is reason to believe that 

 crickets and katydids have their disconcerting regional vernaculars 

 and provincialisms as well. Snodgrass has noted this peculiarity in 

 the case of the true katydid, Pterophylla camellifolia^ and says : " It 

 is very noticeable that the song of the katydids about Washington is 

 much less harsh and grating in tone than is that of the New Eng- 

 landers." I can fully agree with Snodgrass; peculiar intonations 

 unquestionably exist, constituting a definite vernacular. I have ob- 

 served the same distinctiveness in the singing of other katydids, in- 

 cluding the oblong-winged katydid, Amhlycorypha ohlongifolia^ there 

 being an appreciable difference between the tones of the New England 

 musicians and those of the Washington musicians of this species. 

 Somehow the two groups inflect differently, or those of one group 

 dwell more upon their notes, or rasp more or less energetically, and 

 that is all we know about it. These distinctions are moods and modes 

 of inherent physiology and environment of which we know little. A 

 vernacular, as we have seen, may exist in widely separated localities, 

 or almost interblend with others in the same locality. It is probable 

 that these isolations of speech or language among insects have much 

 in common with the localized vernaculars and provincialisms of men, 

 eternally becoming emphasized in valley and plain over all the earth. 

 As the matter stands, profound differences of stridulation may be 

 found with no noticeable modification in the morphological facies, or 

 profound changes in color, etc., may suddenly arise with no evident 

 change in the method of stridulation. A year ago I found a decidedly 



