588 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



muscular energy is prodigious, for they must produce some thou- 

 sands of strokes per minute of the scraper over the file vein, for 

 hours, days, weeks, until death overtakes them. These powerful 

 katydids probably rasp their file veins with their scrapers from 

 thirty to fifty million times in the course of a season, in some weird, 

 incomprehensible, mood of consciousness and self-expression. Sex- 

 ual allurements alone do not account for this tremendous expendi- 

 ture of nervous and muscular energy, but perchance some inherent, 

 pervasive mood that makes all things move and spin eternally in a 

 round of restless play, whether it be electrons, planets, or what not, 

 in the physical universe. If this is the extreme of intense organic 

 ,song energy we find the snowy tree cricket breaking it up into 

 periods of rest, like the incessantly recurring beats of our own hearts, 

 with alternations of rest and work. The very extreme of reduced 

 song energy appears to have been attained by such katydids as the 

 Phaneropteras, which may deliver only a few strokes of the scraper 

 upon the file vein in a day, in the most indifferent and haphazard 

 manner. It is a mystery how the sound-making devices have arisen 

 at all, even on those surfaces where, owing to the proximity of their 

 frictional instruments, they should be expected to arise. It is a 

 mj^stery how the moods of stridulation are so fixed and innate as 

 to make each cricket and katydid know intuitively the distinctive 

 notes of its own species. It would appear that both physical and 

 psychic elements enter into the matter. Some of the grasshoppers 

 of the genus Melanoplus^ which have no stridulatory organs, never- 

 theless appear to have the mood for stridulation, for they have been 

 observed to go in some blind way through the usual stridulatory 

 movements of other grasshoppers. On the other hand, one of our 

 bush crickets, Hapithus agitator^ has the structures present but ap- 

 pears little inclined to stridulation. Rarely does this cricket stridu- 

 late, and rarely, it would seem, does it even want to stridulate. At 

 least it is more sluggish in this reluctant behavior than any other 

 cricket I have ever observed. I have a feeling that the mood for 

 stridulation is waning in this cricket, just as we find birds little 

 inclined to fly, or birds with wings diminished in size. Life is a 

 matter of impulses, which may be strong or weak, regardless of the 

 consciousness of the individual. I see no reason why crickets, from 

 some weird, inherent cause, should not become as averse to stridu- 

 lation as some birds appear to have become averse to flying. These 

 are the moods of life which defy explanation, but they are the moods, 

 so to speak, of atoms, molecules, proteins, radium, and what you 

 will in the universe — change upward, change downward, but never 

 constancy or fixity in anything. 



