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ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1923 



found the weak spot in everybody's character, wrote a fable about 

 the Tettix and the ant in which the Tettix, or cicada, after having 

 sung all summer, asked a bit of food from the ant when the chill 

 winds of coming winter struck him unprovided. But the prac- 

 tical ant replied : " Well, now you can dance." This is a very 

 unjust piece of satire, because the moral is drawn in favor of the 

 ant. Human musicians have learned their lesson and sign their 

 contracts with the box-office management in advance. But the whole 

 story about the cicada and the ant is a very improbable tale, because 

 the cicada can eat only liquid food and the common ant keeps only 

 solid provender in his cellar. All the cicadas have a long beak 



Fig. 29. — One of the cicadas that are heard es T ery year, Tibicen prulnosa (a little larger 



than natural size) 



through which they extract sap from the twigs of trees, if they 

 take any food at all (see pp. 393 to 396 of Smithsonian Report for 

 1919), and the cicada of the fable would have starved on anything 

 the ant might have offered. 



There are a number of species of cicadas that come every year. 

 They are known as locusts, harvest flies, and dog-day cicadas, and 

 are the insects that sit in the trees on warm afternoons and make 

 those long, shrill sounds so suggestive of hot weather. Some give 

 a rising and falling tone to their song, like zioing, zwing, zwing, 

 zwing, others a rattling sound, and still otliers make just a continuous 

 whistling buzz. Then there is the 17-year species that appears in 

 large swarms somewhere every few years. Each individual lives in 



