156 THE CAUSES WHICH PROPAGATE 



ploring" the river jungle of the Amazons, has a powerful 

 wing drum of the type seen in our Great Green Leaf-cricket 

 (Plate II., Fig. 5) ; and when a male was captured by that 

 gentleman, and confined in a cage, its intermitting quirks of 

 music, sharp and resonant — '^Ta^na-na! ta-ua-na!^^ — could be 

 heard echoing from one end of the village in which he was staying 

 to the other. The notes of a West Indian kind, perhaps that 

 termed by an old writer the Gully Bell [Locusta cameUfoUa), 

 are described as slow and measured, resembling an articulation 

 of the words, "^ Shock! shock!'' Of a third giant flying leaf 

 {Tlatyphyllu))i concavum), we learn that the males during Sep- 

 tember and October band darkling among^ the tall summits of 

 Canadian forests, and there, shrouded in the dusk of eventide, 

 commence a screeching cadence of " Katy-did-she-did ! " continued 

 throughout the live-long night. Their mute females, unprovided 

 with the noisy organ, can still on capture evince resentment by 

 shuffling their elytra, thereby raising a low grating sound. 



The shrill of the smaller species of Phanerojotera may be 

 heard by the traveller almost everywhere within the warmer 

 zones of the earth at the close of the day. In Northern Italy 

 the antique and quaint little Phaneroptera falcata of Scopuli^ 

 with its knife-shaped wing-covers shorter than the projecting 

 wings they conceal, remains throughout the day clinging on the 

 sepia-green tufts of the acacia, where the similarity of its tint 

 affords chromatic protection and harbour, so that the very brown 

 summer freckles on the soft leaflets find a counterpart on the 

 insect's thorax. And so they stay unobserved until about half- 

 past five in the evening, when the slim-legged males, still spectre- 

 like and motionless, kindle up in running serenade to a brisk 

 momentary crepitation, uttered in the society of their cimetered 

 females, which bears apt comparison with the catch heard on 

 winding up a watch, " Crick ! crick ! " They are at all hours 

 easily provoked and sound-sensitive, becoming especially lively 

 to the quickening stanzas of the guitar, and they never remain 

 mute when the bells and crackers of a church festa invade their 

 seclusion ; but if we seek to confine them in a gauze-covered 

 box they without fail mope, and cease their music. The New^ 

 World P. curvicauda is by preference nocturnal, according to 

 Dr. Scudder. His diurnal music is '^ bzrwi " and lasts one-third 



