NA TURAL HISTOR Y OF SELBORNE. 219 



sound, and hot sunshine renders the air thin and weak, and deprives 

 it of all its springiness, and a ruffling wind quite defeats the whole. 

 In a still, clear, dewy evening the air is most elastic ; and perhaps 

 the later the hour the more so. 



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 entertaining, must 

 at least have been harmless and inoffensive ; yet, Virgil advances 

 a strange notion, that they are injurious to bees. After enumerating 

 some probable 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 admitted 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. 

 But if it should be urged, that though they cannot hear yet perhaps 

 they may feel the repercussions of sounds, I grant it is possible they 

 may. Yet that these impressions are distasteful or hurtful, I deny, 

 because bees, in good summers, thrive well in my outlet, where the 

 echoes are very strong ; for this village is another Anathoth, a 

 place of responses and echoes. Besides, it does not appear from 

 experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected 

 by sounds ; for I have often tried my own with a large speaking- 

 trumpet held close to their hives, and with such an exertion of 

 voice as would have haled a ship at the distance of a mile, and 

 still these insects pursued their various employments undisturbed, 

 and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.* 



* Insects are now proved to be sensible of the impression of sounds. Mr. Bennet has 

 quoted experiments of Brunelli in proof; he learned to imitate the chirping of grass- 

 hoppers, and when he did this at the door of a closet in which they were kept they soon 

 began to answer him. " He afterwards enclosed a male grasshopper in a box, and placed 

 it in one part of his garden, leaving a female at liberty in a distant part of it ; as soon as 

 the male began to sing the female immediately hopped away towards him." Insects being in 

 possession of the power of emitting sounds, these must be subservient for some purpose, 

 and from the above experiments we find them to be responded to. It is remarkable that 

 in the Cicadse the females are destitute of the sound-making organs, ' Yet," writes Owen, 

 in one of the latest general summaries of structure (1843), " the precise organ has not yet 

 been definitely recognised." And Messrs. Gould and Agassiz state the grasshopper for 

 instance, to have a sort of ear, no longer situated in the head as with other animals, but 

 in the legs, and from this fact we may be allowed to suppose that if no organ of hearing 

 has yet been found in most insects, it is because it has been sought for in the head only." 



