NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 127 



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 y a place of responses or 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 show- 

 ing the least sensibility or resentment. 1 



Some time since it's discovery this echo is become 

 totally silent, though the object, or hop-kiln, remains : nor 

 is there any mystery in this defect ; for the field between 

 is planted as an hop-garden, and the voice of the speaker 

 is totally absorbed and lost among the poles and entangled 

 foliage of the hops. And when the poles are removed in 

 autumn the disappointment is the same ; because a tall 

 quick-set hedge, nurtured up for the purpose of shelter to 

 the hop ground, entirely interrupts the impulse and reper- 



1 Sir William Jardine writes (ed. " Selborne," p. 219, note) : " Insects are now 

 proved to be sensible of the impression of sounds. Mr. Bennett has quoted ex- 

 periments of Brunelli in proof; he learned to imitate the chirping of grasshoppers, 

 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 toward him." My friend, the late Mr. Joachim Monteiro, the explorer of 

 Angola, possessed a marvellous faculty for mimicking the cries and notes of birds 

 and insects : among other exploits in this direction, he was in the habit of calling 

 house-crickets to him by imitating their note, and used to feed them with 

 chopped meat and other things. By going into the kitchen at night, when the 

 house was still, and calling them he has had as many as eleven of these little 

 creatures sitting on his hand and eating the food provided for them. [R. B. S.] 



