NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 219 
sound, and hot sunshine renders the air thin and weak, and deprives 
it of all its springiness, and a ruffling wind quite defeats the whole. 
In a still, clear, dewy evening the air is most elastic; and perhaps 
the later the hour the more so. 
Echo has always been so amusing to the imagination, that the 
poets have personified her; and in their hands she has been the 
occasion of many a beautiful fiction. Nor need the gravest man 
be ashamed to appear taken with such a phenomenon, since it may 
become the subject of philosophical or mathematical inquiries. 
One should have imagined that echoes, if not entertaining, must 
at least have been harmless and inoffensive ; yet, Virgil advances 
a strange notion, that they are injurious to bees. After enumerating 
some probable and reasonable annoyances, such as prudent owners 
would wish far removed from their bee-gardens, he adds— 
— — “aut ubi concava pulsu 
Saxa sonant, vocisque offensa resultat imago.”’ 
This wild and fanciful assertion will hardly be admitted by the 
philosophers of these days, especially as they all now seem agreed 
that insects are not furnished with any organs of hearing at all. 
But if it should be urged, that though they cannot hear yet perhaps 
they may feel the repercussions of sounds, I grant it is possible they 
may. Yet that these impressions are distasteful or hurtful, I deny, 
because bees, in good summers, thrive well in my outlet, where the 
echoes are very strong; for this village is another Anathoth, a 
place of responses and echoes. Besides, it does not appear from 
experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected 
by sounds ; for I have often tried my own with a large speaking- 
trumpet held close to their hives, and with such an exertion of 
voice as would have haled a ship at the distance of a mile, and 
still these insects pursued their various employments undisturbed, 
and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.* 
* Insects are now proved to be sensible of the impression of sounds. Mr. Bennet has 
quoted experiments of Brunelli in proof; he learned to imitate the chirping of grass- 
hoppers, and when he did this at the door of a closet in which they were kept they soon 
began to answer him. ‘‘ He afterwards enclosed a male grasshopper in a box, and placed 
it in one part of his garden, leaving a female at liberty in a distant part of it ; as soon as 
the male began to sing the female immediately hopped away towards him.” Insects being in 
possession of the power of emitting sounds, these must be subservient for some purpose, 
and from the above experiments we find them to be responded to. It is remarkable that 
in the Cicadz the females are destitute of the sound-making organs, ‘* Yet,” writes Owen, 
in one of the latest general summaries of structure (1843), ‘* the precise organ has not yet 
been definitely recognised.’? And Messrs. Gould and Agassiz state the grasshopper for 
instance, to have a sort of ear, no longer situated in the head as with other animals, but 
in the legs, and from this fact we may be allowed to suppose that if no organ of hearing 
has yet been found in most insects, it is because it has been sought for in the head only.” 
