306 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



made more noise in the world, than the Cicada tribe. 

 From the time of Homer, who compares the garrulity 

 of age to the chirping of these insects ^, they have been 

 celebrated by the poets; and Anacreon, as you well 

 know, has inscribed a very beautiful little ode to them. 

 We learn from Aristotle, that these insects were eaten 

 by the polished Greeks, and accounted very delicious. 

 The worm {larva), he says, lives in the earth where it 

 takes its growth ; that it then becomes a Tettigometra 

 (pupa), when he observes they are most delicious, just 

 before they burst from their covering. From this state 

 they change to the Tettix or Cicada, when the males at 

 first have the best flavour ; but after impregnation the 

 females are preferred on account of their white eggs ^. 

 Athenseus also and Aristophanes mention their being 

 eaten ; and ^Elian is extremely angry with the men of 

 his age that an animal sacred to the Muses should be 

 strung, sold, and greedily devoured '^. Pliny tells us 

 that the nations of the East, even the Parthians, whose 

 wealth was abundant, use them as food'*. The imago of 

 the Cicada sejncmdecim is still eaten by the Indians in 

 America, who pluck off the wings and boil them^ This 

 ancient Greek taste for Cicadce seems now gone out of 

 fashion, at least travellers do not notice it : but perhaps 

 if it were revived in those countries where the insects 

 are to be found, for they inhabit only warm climates *^, 

 it would be ascertained that so polished a people did not 

 relish them without reason. 



» Horn. //. y. 150-4. ^ Arist. Hist. An. 1. v. c. 30. 



" Vide Bochart, Hicroz. ii. 1. 4. c. 7. 491. 



^ Hist. Nat. 1. xi, c. 26. " P. CoUinson in Phil. Trans. 1763. n. x. 



f One species however has been found in Hampshire in the New 



Forest. See Samouellc's Entomologist^ s Useful Compendium, t. v./. 2. 



