1/4 



Marvels of Insect Life. 



is able to deposit her eggs in safe crevices. From these hatch out minute, six- 

 legged creatures, much like herself, except that they have no wings. They run and 

 leap, and feed and grow, casting their skins five or six times to permit the latter 

 process, and only at the last moult acquire wings. 



One of the favourite objects of the microscope is labelled " the cricket's 

 tongue " ; but, as usually prepared and mounted, it gives, like the microscopist's 

 " tongue of blow-fly," a totally erroneous notion of the organ as found in the mouth 

 of the Insect. The " tongue " of the cricket is really a grooved eminence on the 



lower part of the mouth, and serves as a channel 

 for the salivarv fluid. Whether it is actually 

 employed in lapping up liquid food, as has been 

 suggested, is open to question. 



In addition to the house-cricket, which 

 may be a native or an immigrant from a warmer 

 country — as its adoption of an indoor life 

 suggests — we have the wood-cricket, the field- 

 cricket, and the mole-cricket as our sole 

 British representatives of the cricket family. 

 The mole-cricket differs so remarkably from 

 the others that it calls for separate treatment. 



The field-cricket is neither so plentiful nor 

 so well known as the house-cricket. One might 

 go so far as to venture the estimate that to every 

 thousand persons in these islands who have 

 frequently seen the house-cricket, not one has 

 seen the field-cricket — that is to say alive and 

 in a state of freedom. Though the two are built 

 on similar lines, there is little danger of con- 

 fusing them. The lively pale-brown chirruper 

 that makes our kitchens ring o' nights with his 

 tireless fiddling, is not only smaller, but more 

 slender than his black relation ^ of the fields. 

 He has the same square head and fore-body, the 

 flat back produced by the wing-covers, which 

 turn sharply down to protect his sides. He 

 produces his song in the same way — that is, 

 by scraping his file of one wing-cover over the 

 ridges of the other. He can heighten the sound by loosening the edges of 

 his wing-covers where they lap over his sides, or he can soften it by pressing these 

 closer to him. It is thus that he ])roduces the \eiitril();]uial effect of 

 making his song sound as coming from a distance, wlien the musician is 

 close at your side. Fabre, who lias t'xperimenteil with captix'e crickets, 

 says the unmuffled sound can bi' heard at a distance of tour hundred yards. 

 The sanie observer, whose life spent in Prox'ence has given him amjile 

 opportunity for comparing the songs of the cicada and the field-cricket, says 



1 (iryllus c;uni)t'stris. 



The Wood-Cricket. 



Little as the field-crirket is known, far less so is the wood- 

 cricket. In general appearance it much resembles the 

 •domestic cricket, but is considerably smaller. The photo- 

 graph is three times the natural size. 



