226 THE CAUSES WHICH PllOP AGATE 



equinox, aud prolong- their notes until the arrival of the autumnal 

 grasshoppers^ as has been rightly observed by Pliny, Pseudo- 

 Aristotle, and others. In northern England their woodland 

 melody has not yet fallen on the ear of the entomologist, but 

 it must not therefore be inferred these musicians are wholly 

 absent, for among the rich and beauteous southern fauna of 

 Hampshire and Surrey we still reckon one outlying Avaif of 

 the cigales, baptised by Curtis Cicada Anglica, seemingly the 

 Montana of Scopoli, if not Hcematodes in projirid persona. The 

 male, usually beaten in June from blossoming hawthorn in the 

 New Forest, is provided with instruments of music, and the 

 female, more terrestrial, is often observed wandering with a 

 whirring sound among bracken wastes, where she is thought 

 to deposit her ovae. 



The tymbals of the cicadae were implicitly received by the 

 writers of Greece and Rome as the true organs of sound, and the 

 males, from the shape of these instruments, were called achetse, 

 the shrill-sounding ^-^etoy being a small kind of kettledrum^ 

 which these membranes resemble."^ These lenticular, shell-like 

 membranes were also received as the producers of the sound by 

 mediaeval Italian anatomists, and as such have passed unchal- 

 lenged by more modern naturalists. The next advance was, record- 

 ing the action of these tymbals during the production of the song, 

 a matter somewhat anticipated indeed by Julius Casserius of 

 rerrara,t who, as far back as the year 1600, described them as 

 sounding by being drawn in and out by a muscle, and rustling as 

 goldbeater^s skin. But, at all events, the subject was taken up 

 and further elucidated by Reaumur, J who detected the tendon t, 

 attached at the inner side of these kettledrums or tymbals, at 

 a short distance from their lower edge, proceeding from the 

 muscle m, which, running obliquely downwards, is inserted into 

 a horny internal Y piece. This author also promulgated the 



* C. G. Carus, "Analeetcn zur Naturwissensdiaft und Heilkundc, " Dresden, 

 1821, s. 151. 



+ Carus gives a list of Italian authors who have remarked on the singing of 

 the cicada^ between a.d. 1600 — 1700. See also Hagen's "Bibliotheca Entomo- 

 logica," B. II., p. 477. Eeference also to Latin and Greek authors. 



J Eeaumur, "Mem. pour Ser.," T.V., Mem. 5. All succeeding writers 

 on this subject have followed this illustrious entomologist in bis views respecting 

 these ori;aus. 



