148 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



. . . Cicada anglica, seemingly the montana of Scopoli, 

 if not Haematodes in proprid persona. The male, 

 usually beaten in June from blossoming hawthorn in 

 the New Forest, is provided with instruments of music, 

 and the female, more terrestrial, is often observed 

 wandering with a whirring sound among bracken 

 wastes, where she is thought to deposit her ova." 



It struck me some time ago that some of the dis- 

 appointed entomologists may have heard the sound 

 they were listening for without knowing it. In seek- 

 ing for an object some rare little flower, let us say, 

 or a chipped flint, or a mushroom we set out with 

 an image of it in the mind, and unless the object 

 sought for corresponds to its mental prototype, we 

 in many cases fail to recognise it and pass on. And 

 it is the same with sounds. The listeners perhaps 

 heard a sound so unlike their idea, or image, of a 

 cicada's song, or so like the sound of some other 

 quite different insect, that they paid no attention to it, 

 and so missed what they sought for. At all events, 

 I can say that unless we have some Orthopterous 

 insect of a species unknown to me, which sings in 

 trees, then our cicada does sing, and I have heard 

 it. The sound which I heard, and which was new 

 to me, came from the upper foliage of a large thorn- 

 tree in the New Forest, but unfortunately -it ceased 

 on my approach, and I failed to find the singer. The 

 entomologist may say that the question remains as 

 it was, but my experience may encourage him to try 



