14 3I0SQUIT0ES 



to most people extremely initatiuji;-. This faiut souuci 

 will wiikeu many from the soundest sleep. It is not loud, 

 and in (piality may perhaps best be compared to the dis- 

 tant note of a bagpipe. The sound is apparently pro- 

 duced, as with Hies and other dipterous insects, not by 

 the rapid vibration of the wings, but by the vibrations of 

 a chitinous process in the large trache.e just behind the 

 thoracic spiracles. These vibrations are produced by the 

 air during respiration. Dragon-flies and bees, as well as 

 flies, sing in this way. With bees, however, the rapid 

 vibration of the wings causes another hum, and the two 

 notes are most readily distinguished, the wing tone of the 

 honey bee being A', while the breathing voice is at least 

 an octave higher, and sometimes nine or ten inW tones 

 higher, going to B" and C". The exact musical note of 

 the difterent species of mosquitoes seems not to have been 

 investigated, but as long ago as 1874, A. M. Mayer, in the 

 course of his researches in acoustics, made some most in- 

 teresting experiments with the supposed auditory appa- 

 ratus of some species of Culex, which, unfortunately, Avas 

 not named. Mayer established the fact that some of the 

 antennal hairs of the male mosquito are auditory. With 

 tuning-fork experiments he showed that some of the hairs 

 are especially tuned so as to respond to vibrations num- 

 bering 512 per second. Other hairs vibrated to other 

 notes. He also experimented with the song of the female, 

 and showed that the auditory hairs of the male antenune 

 vibrate when the song of the female comes at right angles 

 to them. If the song is directly in front of the head it 

 will be most fully perceived by the hairs. If the song of 



