INSECT MUSICIANS SNODGRASS 419 



Canada, is noted for its large size and dignified manners. A male 

 (fig. 8), kept by the writer one summer in a cage, never once lost 

 his decorum by the humiliation of confinement. He lived apparently 

 a natural and contented life, feeding on grape leaves and on ripe 

 grapes, obtaining the pulp of the latter by gnawing holes through 

 the skin. He was always sedate, always composed, his motions 

 always slow and deliberate. In walking he carefully lifted each foot 

 and brought the leg forward with a steady movement to the new 

 position, where the foot was carefully set down again. Only in the 

 act of jumping did he ever make a quick movement of any sort. 

 But his preparations for the leap were as calm and unhurried as his 

 other acts: Pointing the head upward, dipping the abdomen slowly 

 downward, the two long hind legs bending up in a sharp inverted 

 V on each side of the body, one would think he was deliberately 

 preparing to sit down on a tack, but all at once a catch seems to be 

 released somewhere as he suddenly springs upward into the leaves 

 overhead, at which he had taking such long and careful aim. 



For a long time the aristocratic prisoner uttered no sound, but at 

 last one evening he repeated three times a squeaking note resembling 

 shriek with the s much aspirated and with a prolonged vibration 

 on the ie. The next evening he played again, making at first a weak 

 swish, swish, swish, with the s very sibilant and the i very vibratory. 

 But after giving this as a prelude he began a shrill shrie-e-e-e-k, 

 shrie-e-e-e-k, repeated about six times, a loud sound described by 

 Blatchley as a " creaking squawk — like the noise made, by drawing 

 a fine-toothed comb over a taut string." 



The best known members of the round-headed katydids, and per- 

 haps of the whole family, are the angular- winged katydids (fig. 9). 

 These are large, maple-leaf green insects, much flattened from side 

 to side, with the leaflike wings folded high over the back and 

 abruptly bent on their upper margins, giving the creatures the hump- 

 backed appearance from which they get their name of angular- 

 winged katydids. The sloping surface of the back in front of the 

 hump makes a large flat triangle, plain in the female, but in the 

 male corrugated and roughened by the veins of the musical apparatus. 



There are two species of the angular-winged katydids in the 

 United States, both belonging to the genus Microcentrwm, one dis- 

 tinguished as the larger angular-winged katydid, M. rhonibifolium, 

 and the other as the smaller angular-winged katydid, M. retinerve. 

 The females of the larger species (fig. 9), which is the more common 

 one, reach a length of 2% inches measured to the tips of the wings. 

 They lay flat, oval eggs, stuck in rows overlapping like scales along 

 the surface of some twig or on the edge of a leaf. 



These katydids are attracted to lights and may frequently be 

 found on warm summer nights in the shrubbery about the house, 



