IITSECT INSTRUMENTALISTS — ALLAED 589 



APPRECIATION OF INSECT SOUNDS 



Humanity is in its babyhood when its age is compared with the 

 ancient lineage of the insects. It is possible that musical insects were 

 fiddling out songs to their own race in the great waving jungles of 

 Carboniferous ferns, millions of years before man's embryonic be- 

 ginnings were even indicated. 



The genealogy of it all is an eternal puzzle. It would seem that 

 the earliest insect musicians were among the Neuroptera^ but some- 

 how they did not remain musically inclined and the Orthoptera 

 took up the tuned lyre in dead earnest. However this may be, men 

 in all stages from savage to civilized have at times been impressed 

 by the sounds of insects. We are told that the natives of Uganda 

 kept Gryllotalpa africana and Acheta Uinacidata in warm ovens, 

 to induce soothing sleep with their music and to be eaten if need be. 



In Italy the crickets have been greatly venerated for their music 

 and have been kept in pretty painted cages to be sold on the streets 

 by peddlers. The insect was supposed to bring good luck or mis- 

 fortune for the coming year, depending upon its proclivities as a 

 musician. The Japanese, perhaps more than any other peoples, have 

 become genuinely imbued with a true love of insect music. Their 

 land appears to be particularly rich in large, musical, insect forms, 

 many having especially fine powers of musical expression. The 

 Japanese are an ancient people in comparison with the youthful 

 peoples of America or of Europe. Centuries ago, when our great epic 

 poem Beowulf was being repeated from mouth to mouth, tliey had 

 somehow evolved such a fondness for their musical insects that they 

 were in that ancient day given to countryside pilgrimages to hear 

 them and feel the thrill of poetic associations which their " music " 

 inspired. In Japan at the present time it is a practice to cage them 

 in attractive bamboo cages to hear their music, and they figure in 

 the trade of the cities as do caged song birds in our own land. There 

 is something rather distinctive in this Japanese love of insect music ; 

 to say the least, it attests an intensive love of nature which we as 

 Americans rarely evince except in occasional individuals — a Thoreau, 

 a Burroughs, an F. Schuyler Mathews, a Scudder. 



We Americans are too busy, too hurried, too mechanized in our 

 moods, to stop long enough to hear what this cricket or that 

 katydid says. Ah ! if we can not hear the bird or cricket or katydid 

 itself, we are surely going to ignore the poem which portrays it as 

 some one else he^rd it. To-day we are a hurried, worried people. To 

 the majority delving iuto nature studies, into poetry, art, the finer 

 literature, is not a materially gainful pastime. Many a time have I 

 been asked "What good are crickets and katydids? Why bother 

 about them? " That is typical of the average American logic, but 

 there is more to life than measuring every mood in terms of financial 



