THE ORTHOPTERA. 343 



for his musical apparatus. A male and female are on the ground, 

 and have not yet completed their full growth. 



Everybody knows and can recognise a cricket, but naturalists 

 appear to have done their best to make ordinary mortals confound 

 crickets with grasshoppers, and both with locusts. Thus the French 

 call crickets Grillidcu, and the grasshoppers Loaistcs. The English 

 call the grasshoppers Grillidce and Achetidce. There are Field 

 Crickets, and House Crickets, and Mole Crickets, and they have 

 great resemblances to the grasshoppers. 



The crickets are nocturnal insects, whose colours are dark 

 and of brown and grey tints, but the grasshoppers and locusts 

 like the light. They have all long and slender antennae, and legs 

 adapted for jumping, and the elytra of the males have a large 

 musical apparatus, and the females possess an elongated ovipositor. 

 There are two principal types in this family — the crickets 

 whose front legs and feet are simple in their structure, and the 

 mole crickets, which have flattened fore legs. The musical sound 

 of the crickets has given them their name, and we hear it by 

 night in the fields and in houses hour after hour. These insects 

 live very solitary existences, except w4ien they are disposed for 

 that society which they suppose they can obtain by their ever- 

 lasting chirp. Each one of them digs a hole, and does not leave 

 it except during the night, and children in the fields, who know 

 this, can often catch a field cricket by poking straws down cracks 

 in the ground. The house cricket, which is of a yellow grey 

 colour, and more or less marked with brown tints, is smaller 

 than the other, and hides itself in holes and cracks in old walls 

 and chimneys. It is a chilly insect, and it seeks its nourish- 

 ment and delights to live in warm places. In towns it prefers 

 bakeries and the neighbourhood of ovens, and in the country 

 the most humble kitchens. are favoured by its merry chirp. 



The engraving on the opposite page shows a cricket emerging 

 from its hole, and a female on the bank above it ; the imperfect 

 insects are on the ground in front. 



The mole crickets are large insects, and are wonderfully adapted 

 for their particular method of life. They live under ground, and 

 very rarely leave their holes. Their body is almost cylindrical, 

 their feet are thick and short ; their front legs, which are also 



