OF SELBORNE. 319 



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 enter- 

 taining, must at least have been harmless and inoffen- 

 sive ; yet Virgil advances a strange notion, that they 

 are injurious to bees. After enumerating some pro- 

 bable 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 admit- 

 ted 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 2 . But, if it should 



2 The opinion advanced in the text as one in which the philosophers of 

 the author's day seemed all agreed, was shared by Linnaeus and Bonnet, 

 naturalists of the highest authority. But repeated observations and expe- 

 riments have since shown that many insects, and among these it is highly 

 probable that bees are to be included, possess the sense of hearing. With- 

 out the aid of experiment it might, indeed, almost be regarded as esta- 

 blished, that in those cases in which the faculty of producing sound is 

 possessed by one sex of an animal, that of hearing it should belong to the 

 other sex ; and it would seem rather preposterous to grant the existence 

 of a sense in one sex of an insect and deny it to the other. Gilbert White, 

 in his Letter respecting the field cricket (XL VI.), although in the earlier 

 part of it he seems to guard himself from admitting that these insects 

 hear by assuming that they feel " a person's footsteps as he advances," 

 must be regarded as insinuating the possession of that sense when he 

 subsequently remarks that " the males only make that shrilling noise, 

 perhaps out of rivalry and emulation" a rivalry and emulation which 

 could not be excited in others by a sound unheard by them. 



But reasoning and conjecture are both equally unnecessary in a case 

 in which direct observation may be adduced in proof. Brunelli's experi- 

 ments seem on this point altogether satisfactory, and to prove that both 

 the males and the females possess the sense of hearing. He kept several 

 males of the large green grasshopper in a closet, where they were very 

 merry and continued singing all the day : but a tap at the door would 



