150 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



spots, always in the evening. It is easy, even 

 after dark, to find him by following up the sound, 

 when he may be seen moving excitedly about on 

 the topmost sprays or leaves, pausing at intervals 

 to stridulate, and occasionally taking short leaps from 

 spray to spray. He belongs to a family widely dis- 

 tributed on the earth, and in La Plata I was fami- 

 liar with two species which in form and colour 

 a uniform vivid green were just like our viridis- 

 sima, but differed in size, one being smaller and the 

 other twice as large. The smaller species sang by 

 day, all day long, among water-plants growing in the 

 water ; the large species stridulated only by night, 

 chiefly in the maize fields, and was almost as loud 

 and harsh as the cicadas of the same region. I dis- 

 tinctly remember the sounds emitted by these two 

 species, and by several other grasshoppers and leaf- 

 crickets, but none of their sounds came very near 

 in character to that of viridissima. This is a curious, 

 and to my sense a very beautiful sound; and when 

 a writer describes it as "harsh," which we not un- 

 frequently find, I must conclude either that one of 

 us hears wrongly, or not as the world hears, or that, 

 owing to poverty, he is unable to give a fit expres- 

 sion. It is a sustained sound, a current of brightest, 

 finest, bell-like strokes or beats, lasting from three or 

 four to ten or fifteen seconds, to be renewed again 

 and again after short intervals; but when the musi- 

 cian is greatly excited, the pauses last only for a 



