CHAPTER VII 



Great and greatest among insects Our feeling for insect music 

 Crickets and grasshoppers Cicada anglica Locusta viridissima 

 Character of its music Colony of green grasshoppers 

 Harewood Forest Purple emperor Grasshoppers' musical 

 contests The naturalist mocked Female viridissima Over- 

 elaboration in the male Habits of female Wooing of the male 

 by the female. 



I HAD thought to include all or most of the greatest of 

 the insects known in these parts in the last chapter, 

 but the hornet, and the vision it called up of that 

 last revel in the late blossoming ivy on the eve of 

 winter and cold death seemed to bring that part of 

 the book to an end. The hornet was the greatest in 

 the sense that a strong man and conqueror is the 

 greatest among ourselves, as the lion or wolf among 

 mammals, and that feathered thunderbolt and scourge, 

 the peregrine falcon among birds. But there are great 

 and greatest in other senses; and just as there are 

 singers, big and little, as well as warriors among the 

 "insect tribes of human kind," so there are among 

 these smaller men of the mandibulate division of the 

 class Insecta. And their singers, when not too loud 

 and persistent, as they are apt to be in warmer lands 

 than ours, are among the most agreeable of the in- 

 habitants of the earth. They are less to us than to the 



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