150 INSECT MISCELLANIES. 



position, he immediately made reprisals by eating a 

 hole into her side. Yet we had for several weeks 

 a great number of this species, both male and female, 

 hopping about our study, without one attempting to 

 prey on another. They manifested, however, not a little 

 mutual fear on a near approach, and in such cases 

 the male always uttered two or three notes of alarm, 

 and started away *. An eminent entomologist of 

 the present day having caught one of these insects, 

 and holding it by one of its hind-legs, it made a 

 sudden spring, and jerked off its leg: the limb was 

 put with the insect in a phial, and by the following 

 morning this portion of itself was half-devoured. 



Those who have been erroneously taught at school 

 to translate the Latin cicada and the Greek Terrtf, by 

 " grasshopper," will perceive from these details that 

 it is a very mistaken notion to suppose these insects 

 feed on dew t It is to the treehopper, and not to 

 the grasshopper, that these lines of Anacreon apply : 



Happy creature! what below 

 Can live more happily than thou ? 

 Seated on thy leafy throne, 

 (Summer weaves thy verdant crown,) 

 Sipping o'er the pearly lawn 

 The fragrant nectar of the dawn, 

 Little tales thou lovest to sing, 

 Tales of mirth an infant king. 



But we need wonder less at popular mistakes of 

 this kind, when we find similar ones promulgated, 

 respecting the insects in question, by so eminent 

 a naturalist as Swammerdam. " I preserve," says 

 he, " a three-fold stomach of a locust, which is very 

 like the stomachs of animals that chew the cud, 

 and particularly has that part of the stomach called 



*J.R. 

 t Virgil, Bucol. v. 77 j Plin, Hist, Nat, xi. 26. 



