170 THE CAUSES WHICH PROPAGATE 



steam, " liisss ! " You first hear the saucy rattle of its fine- 

 wrouglit rausical-hox, lasting from ten to fifteen seconds, when 

 another more distant performer springs on the alert, and another 

 and another; and as you proceed over the green oozy tufts in 

 quest of game, the scared and agile males leap high from under 

 your feet, with a sudden rustle like the whispering eddy catching 

 the brown beech-leaves in autumn, yet sharp as the ring of a 

 whinstone or flint. These largeish green grasshoppers appear in 

 the perfect state over the plains and on the mountain-sides of 

 Central and Northern Europe at the end of June, and in August 

 they pair. When this all-important season approaches, the males 

 gather round their females on the warm and sunny banks in 

 coteries of four or more, and challenge. Then one or other of 

 their number advances to the sex, discriminated by her larger 

 size and more portly ways, and, placing himself alongside, or 

 with his head directed toward the centre of her body, sings 

 briskly on one or both legs, producing a harsh grating call-note, 

 like a snapped watch-spring or dancing-hoop, "Tit ! tit ! tit ! " 

 This jarring discord he now and then diversifies with a strange, 

 asinine kicking out of his hinder legs ; and while it proceeds, 

 the complacent female will lower one or other hind leg horizon- 

 tally, so as to expose her proximate auditoiy cavity, and thus 

 listen, sunk in cold apathy, for hours to the ardours of her 

 serenader, who varies his stridor to piano ox forte, in harmony 

 with the passing gleams of light and shadow. This state of 

 things goes on day after day, and but rarely in the afternoon 

 a pair may be observed accoupled. Not then, however, does the 

 beau cease his music ; he briskly prattles or snarls to every 

 interloper who dares approach his seclusion, and, with true 

 grasshopper spirit, will continue snatches of recitative, even 

 when the throes of death press upon him, and the golden 

 meads of Proserpine are all his perspective. In regard to 

 the instrument of stridulation in this species. Dr. Landois says 

 the row of tubercles on the femur of the leaping legs in the 

 male amount to one hundred and nineteen, and this is doubtless 

 tolerably correct ; I myself have found an average of one hmidred 

 and ten in some British species I examined beneath the micro- 

 scope. The stridor is thought chiefly to arise during their 

 downward stroke on the scapular vein. 



