172 LIVES ON DEW. 
delicate structure, edged with a kind of saw or 
file-like apparatus, enables her to make a slit in 
the bark of a tree, into which the eggs are dropped. 
The eggs are white, somewhat oval, and quite flat, 
so as to pack neatly into the slit. The larva is an 
ugly little monster, with six legs, and a soft body 
of a dirty-yellow colour. Two years of his life are 
passed away in the earth, and the time arrives 
when the dark damp tunnels are to be abandoned; 
then from a creeping grub he changes into a 
winged denizen of the air, and with his voiceless 
mate spends a short but merry life, in ceaseless 
exultant jubilee. 
That the cicada lives on dew is not by any 
means a poet’s fancy. Having assumed the 
winged form, it loses the scissor-like mouth, that 
served its purpose admirably in the subterranean 
home for nipping up fine root-fibres, and has in 
its place a kind of sucker-like snout, with which 
it sucks up the juices of flowers and the sweet 
sap that exudes from the bark of trees. Happy 
as his life appears to be, he has many terrible 
enemies to encounter during the two months of 
his perfect existence. The brilliant oriole, in his 
gorgeous livery of orange-and-black, hunts for him 
under leaves and in the grass; and spying him 
out, nips him with its sharp beak, and descending 
