352 Prof. A. M. Mayer’s E.cperiments on the supposed 
lives. The want of appreciation of these relations, together 
with the fact that many naturalists are more desirous to de- 
scribe many new forms than to ascertain the function of one 
well-known form which may exist in all animals of a class, 
has tended to keep many departments of natural history in the 
condition of mere descriptive science. Those who are not pro- 
fessed naturalists appreciate this perhaps more than the na- 
turalists themselves, who are imbued with that enthusiasm 
which always comes with the earnest study of any one depart- 
ment of nature ; for the perusal of those long and laboriously 
precise descriptions of forms of organs without the slightest 
attempt, or even suggestion, as to their uses, affects a physi- 
cist with feelings analogous to those experienced by one who 
peruses a well-classified catalogue descriptive of physical in- 
struments while of the uses of these instruments he is utterly 
ignorant. 
The following views, taken from the ‘Anatomy of the Inver- 
tebrata’ by C. Th. v. Siebold, will show how various are the 
opinions of naturalists as to the location and form of the organs 
of hearing in the Insecta:—‘‘ There is the same uncertainty 
concerning the organs of audition [as concerning the olfactory 
organs]. Experience having long shown that most insects per- 
ceive sounds, this sense has been located sometimes in this and 
sometimes in that organ. But in their opinion it often seems 
to have been forgotten, or unthought of, that there can be no 
auditory organ without a special auditory nerve which connects 
directly with an acoustic apparatus capable of receiving, con- 
ducting, and concentrating the sonorous undulations. (The 
author who has erred most widely in this respect is Mr. L. W. 
Clarke in Mag. Nat. Hist., September 1838, who has described 
at the base of the antennee of Carabus nemoralis, Ilig., an audi- 
tive apparatus composed of an auricula, a meatus auditorius 
externus and internus, a tympanum and labyrinthus, of all of 
which there is not the least trace. The two white convex spots 
at the base of the antennz of Blatta orientalis, and which Tre- 
viranus has described as auditory organs, are, as Burmeister has 
correctly stated, only rudimentary accessory eyes. Newport and 
Goureau think that the antennz serve both as tactile and as 
auditory organs. But this view is inadmissible, as Krichson 
has already stated, except in the sense that the antenna, like all 
solid bodies, may conduct sonorous vibrations of the air; but 
even admitting this view, where is the auditory nerve?’ for it is 
not at all supposable that the antennal nerve can serve at the 
same time the function of two distinct senses.) 
‘Certain Orthoptera are the only Insecta with which there 
