AND DISTRIBUTE INSECT VAEIETY. 11 



of Our Lord 1877, the singiug-, or more properly the 

 music of the Cicadae, had begun to engage my attention, 

 and as I increased my store of knowledge, the popular 

 accounts of the organisation of these peojjle of the pines, hack- 

 neyed since the days of the great French chemist, appeared 

 more and more unsatisfactory. That it is the males alone that 

 vie in these lively airs, which when the Sun-god ruled the theatre 

 and cii'cus attaiued a eeleln-ity Jenny Lind or Patti might have 

 envied, there can be little doubt, as a naturalist would say in a 

 general way. We have the fact, indeed, handed down from the 

 time of old Zeuaehus, who used to chide his wife with 



" Happy tlie Cicadoe live, 

 Since they all have voiceless wives." 



And when Dr. Bennett was investigating the natxiral history of 

 the antipodes, the aborigines used to inform him concerning 

 these females, " Old woman galang, galang; no got ; no make a 

 noise. ■'■' And what she had not got were two little parchment 

 drums on either side of the body under the wings, that exist 

 alone in the males, and which though noticed by mediEeval 

 Italian physicists, were left to the originator of the thermometric 

 scale to specialise. But then Reaumur in describing these little 

 drums drew his views as to their action from dead and dried 

 specimens, and his notions were not at all borne out in their 

 entirety by subsequent experience. So that in this age of 

 railroad it occurred to me one might easily enjoy what to the 

 French savant was ever an unrealised day-dream, and personally 

 hear this music, the delight of chiefs and sages. I should 

 mention I had previously trod in vain the renowned stretches of 

 whitethorn, interspersed with bracken, in the New Forest, in 

 hopes of finding a musical straggler of our native Cicadae ; and 

 an alternative scheme to plod the ploughed fields around the 

 Fontainebleau forest, seemed, if sportsmanlike, to promise but a 

 poor bag. 



Many and various are the emotions evoked by a holiday 



Ent. Annual, 1873, p. 70. The Cumberland and Welsh mountains have been 

 indicated as forming an elevated line of migration of these species southward. 

 Regarding the Lepidoptera of an ancient raised beach in Norfolk, see paper by 

 C. G. Barrett, Ent. Hon. Mag., Feb., 1871, &c. 



