284 CICADA 
As the entire body of this insect, inside and out- 
side, has been converted into an instrument of sound, 
with its drums and air chambers, we can say of it 
that its music is both instrumental and vocal, albeit 
without a vocal apparatus. 
The loudness and shrillness of the sound, like an 
electric bell of tremendous power, or the sound of 
sawing through an iron bar, was distressing to the 
listener in the species I knew in South America; 
like many others, I wondered how the ancient Greeks 
could have taken delight in the music of their tettix. 
I discovered later, not from the books but from my 
own observation, that there are cicadas and cicadas, 
that some species are capable of pleasing sounds; 
and this knowledge, oddly enough, came to me when 
listening to the Cicada anglica, the one and only 
species we have in this country. The "song" of this 
insect has been a debated question during the last 
hundred years or more, many entomologists holding 
that it makes no sound at all: at present it seems 
that I am the only naturalist in England who has 
heard it, and could give an account of it, which I 
have no space to do now, but will only say that it 
is a soft and a pleasing sound, and is more like the 
music of a leaf-locust than of a cicada. If the cicada 
of old Greece made as pleasing a sound as our British 
species their partiality for it was not strange. 
To come back to the orthopterous insects and their 
purely instrumental music. It has been said that it 
can give us pleasure solely because of its associations. 
This we can understand in the case of the "cricket 
