52 



THE LANCASTER FARMER. 



[April, 



resident of Lancaster, and then for the first 

 time I saw and examined their eggs. In 

 1868, their next appearance, my observations 

 were more thorough, and I then for the first 

 time developed and collected the young, and 

 wi-ote and published ten separate papers on 

 the subject, in the city journals, and else- 

 where. No doubt some of you have seen or 

 heard of tlie sere»teen and thirteen year cicadas 

 at other periods than those I have mentioned, 

 and so have I. Although, so far as my exper- 

 ience goes, there is always either seventeen or 

 thirteen years between their appearing, they 

 do not appear in all places in the same year- 

 there are local breaks in their normal periods. 

 "Whether the seventeen year Cicada origi- 

 nally appeared within the limits of its normal 

 habitat, uniformly everywhere in the same 

 year, perhaps can never be determined; it is 

 "suflflcient to say that it does not so ajipear 

 now, whate\'er may have been the cause of 

 this variation. There are districts, even in 

 Pennsylvania, where they make their advent 

 one or more yearsearlier or later than tliey do 

 in the county of Lancaster; but still, so far as 

 observations have been made, seventeen years 

 have always intervened between each advent. 

 There are districts also in which they seem to 

 occur twice in seventeen years; but as they 

 are precisely identical in species, tliis pheno- 

 menon is regarded as the result of two partially 

 overlapping districts, and thus, although they 

 appear to be the same, they in reality are two 

 difEerenl broods, having an inteiTal of seven- 

 teen years lietween their respective advents, 

 which only becomes conspicuous beyond the 

 boundaries of the over-lapping district. This 

 subject may be partially illustrated by a case 

 in point. As I have before stated, our regular 

 "locust year" will occiu' in 1885, yet it is 

 very probable we shall have a partial brood 

 wiihin the limits of Lancaster city the present 

 year. About seventeen years ago Mr. Geo. O. 

 Hensel, of East Orange street,~brought about 

 fifty living specimens from the state of Dela- 

 ware, and set them at liberty in that portion 

 of the city. Last autumn he made an altera- 

 tion in his green-house, and in digging for a 

 foundation he exhumed a large number of 

 these insects In the larva or pupa form ; and 

 within the area of the green-house one indi- 

 vidual actually evolved on the 2ud day of 

 February lust, which I now have preserved in 

 alcohol. He had an abundance of these in- 

 sects on his premises in 1868, and doubtless 

 will have them again in 1885, nothwithstand- 

 ing their appearance there tlie present year. 

 These insects are not migratorial in their 

 habits, after the manner of the true Locusts. 

 Wherever there were trees seventeen years 

 ago, in the branches of which the Cicadas de- 

 posited their eggs, other things being equal, 

 there they will appear in 1885. Their span of 

 life is so brief, and the quantity of aliment 

 they require so limited— if any at all— that 

 there seems no necessity for their migrations, 

 if there is any vegetation on the ground they 

 occupy, that would be a suitable nidus for 

 their eggs. This is not the case with the true 

 Locust. They migrate to new localities as 

 ^oon as they have devoured all the edible 

 vegetation on the one they last occupied. 



The Cicada does not, and perhaps cannot 

 deposit its eggs in the trunk of a large tree 

 They choose small branches, either because 

 they are easier to penetrate, or because they 

 can grasp them and thus acquire sufficient 

 lever power in using their ovipositors. 



Tlie ovipositor is a modification of the sting. 

 What is a sting in some of the other orders of 

 insects, is an ovipositor in the Cicada, as well 

 as in many that are remotely removed from it 

 in systematic classification; and this instru- 

 ment appertains exclusively to the females. 

 Indeed, no male insect in the whole realm 

 possesses either ah ovipositor or a sting, (what- 

 ever significance may be attached to it either 

 as a simple fact or a symbolical representa- 

 tive.) Wlien you are stung by a hornet, a 

 wasp, or a bee of any kind, you" may be sure 

 it was a female. Biit it would be impossible 

 for the Cicada to penetrate any substance 

 •uddenly with its ovipositor, as a "hornet or a 



bee does. The ovipositor is composed of a 

 central rasp, and a sheath on either side of it. 

 The central rasp is manipulated in the man- 

 ner of a small saw or gouge, and the side 

 sheaths follow and keep the incision suffi- 

 ciently open to admit an egg. The eggs are 

 deposited in two parallel rows, and they are 

 all placed in the branch at a uniform oblique 

 angle, each eggimbedded in woody fiber. All 

 the tales, therefore, that have gained circula- 

 tion about the stinging of the Cicada — in the 

 sense of a bee's or wasp's sting— are likely to 

 have no foundation in fact. Nor can they 

 penetrate any substance suddenly with t,he 

 proboscis, as bees or wasps do with their cau- 

 dal stings. A mosquito can't, a horse-fly can't, 

 a bed-bug can't. They begin with a boring 

 motion, and it requires some time to penetrate 

 the external integument. Admitting that 

 people have been stung by Cicada- which is 

 exceedingly doubtful — it never has been de- 

 termined whether the wound was inflicted by 

 the proboscis or the ovipositor. 



The song, or rather the noise made by the 

 Cieacia is the peculiar province of the male 

 insect, the female being entirely silent. It is 

 in allusion to this fact that the crusty old 

 Xenarchus wrote— 



" Happy are Cicada's lives, 

 Since they all have voiceless wives." 



But the song of this insect is not vocal; it 

 does not issue from the throat, as in man, and 

 in animals endowed with vocal power. It is 

 purely mechanical. Attached to the vietaste- 

 mum of the male are two thin plates, which 

 extend down and over the ventral portion of 

 the abdomen, and beneath these plates are 

 delicate abdominal membranes, and by mus- 

 cular vibrations between these peculiar organs 

 a stridulating sound is produced, which is 

 known as' the Cicada's song. Indeed, no in- 

 sect has vocal power. These mechanical stri- 

 dulations are common to many other species 

 of insects. I might instance the crickets, the 

 grasshoppers, aud especially the well-known 

 "katydid;" but in these the musical appara- 

 tus is dorsal or lateral instead of ventral. In 

 the katydid it is on the back, at the base of 

 the wing covers. 



According to a catalogue of Homoptera 

 published at Stettin, Germany, in 1859, there 

 were 259 named species of the genus Cicada 

 given, as the number recorded up to that 

 period by entomologists, of which 21 were 

 North American; 35 Brazilian; 42 Australian ; 

 22 European; 50 African; 7Mexican; 15New 

 Zealand; 20 Asiatic; 4 Javanese; 5 Cuban.; 

 5 West Indian; 24 other parts of Central and 

 South America, and the remainder from sun- 

 dry islands. It is very probable that many of 

 these species have been referred to new 

 genera, but it is also probable that during the 

 active entomological period that has inter- 

 vened, many new species have been dis- 

 covered and described by scientists. There- 

 fore, although the number of species is very 

 indefinite throughout the world; still, so far 

 as positively known, one of our American 

 species is pre-eminently the "Seventeen year 

 Cicada," and is entirely unique. These in- 

 sects, in England, are called "Havest-flies," 

 perhaps because they make their annual ap- 

 pearance about harvest time, but nowhere, 

 except in the United States, are they called 

 Locusts. They are the Cigala of the Italians, 

 the Cigale of the French, and the Cigarva of 

 the Spanish; all of which names are derived 

 from the Latin Cicada. Our own annual 

 species "put in their appearance," usually, 

 about oat-harvest, or about a mouth later 

 thau the seventeen year species, but this does 

 not seem to remove them from the category 

 of IjOcusIs, for we call them the "summer 

 locusts, or the dng-day locusts, " by way of 

 distinction. 



So far as I can ascertain, the first record of 

 the appearance of the seventeen year Cicada 

 in this country, was at Plymouth, Mass., in 

 1633, in a work called Morton's "Memorial," 

 in which he says: "In bigness they were like 

 unto bumble-bees, and came up out of little 

 holes in the ground, aud did eat up the green 

 things, and made such a constant yelling noise, 



as made the woods ring,and ready to deafen the 

 hearers. " Morton's assertion that they ate up 

 green things casts a shadow of doubt over his 

 record; for other early observers state that 

 they did not seem to eat anything, "motion 

 and propagation appearing to be the whole 

 object of their existence." The earliest record 

 of their appearance in Pennsylvania, was in 

 1715, but they must have been here in 1698 

 1681, 1664, 1647 and 1630, and how long be- 

 fore the last named period no man knoweth. 

 Specimens are, or were, in the Linnean collec- 

 tion of 1783, 1800, 1817, 1834, 1851 and 1868. 

 But so numerous are the broods, and so widely 

 are they diffused over our vast territory, that 

 there is not a year pa.sses which is not a "locust 

 year ' ' in some locality. But uotwithstandiu" 

 all this diversity, there is a general concu"- 

 rence in the /act, that there are always seven- 

 teen or thirteen intervening years between the 

 appearance of the respective broods. 



But, a knowledge of the Cicada is not con- 

 fined to merely modern, or even mediseval his- 

 tory, for it was well known to the ancients, 

 and it seems to have been especially a favorite 

 of the Grecian bards from Homer and Hesiod 

 to Anacreon and Theocritus. They esteemed 

 it as perfectly harmless, and lived only upon 

 dew; hence they addressed it by the most en- 

 dearing epithets, and regarded it as almost 

 divine. 



As Egyptians wore their favorite symbol, 

 the sacred ScAEAB.a:us— as an ornament to 

 their head-dress— and especially their combs, 

 so it became a subject of attic pride to set up 

 a rival in the head-dress, ornamented with 

 cicadas, by Cecrops and his followers, and the 

 Samians most probably derived this fashion 

 from the early Athenians. But the admira- 

 tion of the ancients was not limited by the 

 mere dead emblem. To excel the Cicada in 

 singing was the highest commendation of a 

 singer, and the music ot Plato's eloquence was 

 only comparable to the voice of this insect. 

 Homer compared his. good orators to the 

 Cicada, "which, in the woods, sitting on a 

 tree, sends forth a delicate voice." We are 

 compelled to conclude from this, that the 

 Grecian Cicadas must have been more highly 

 gifted with musical powers than those of 

 America, or that their admirers had very un- 

 cultivated "ears for music," and the t-esti- 

 mony of Virgil inclines to the latter conclu- 

 sion, for he ^ays their song is a " disagreeable 

 and stridulous tone," and he accuses them of 

 bursting the very>hf ubs with their noise. 



Notwithstanding the veneration of the 

 Greeks for the Cicada, their epicures made 

 these insects an article of food, and accounted 

 them delicious. Aristotle says, the larva, 

 after its transformation to a pupa, just before 

 or at the time it emerges from the earth, is 

 the sweetest, and this is especially the case 

 with the females, on account of the ova they 

 contain. This is quite in harmony with the 

 likes of our Amei-ican animals; for it was 

 particularly noticed in 1868, that fowls, swine, 

 weasels and even the domestic cats, devoured 

 them with avidity. And not only by these 

 animals and others, but also by our Indian 

 tribes, who esteemed tliem as better than 

 "grasshoppers," although that may not be 

 saying much for thera. 



Among the ancients, JEiUa,n was extremely 

 angry with the men of his age, that an animal 

 sacred to the Muses should be strung, sold 

 and greedily devoured by men. 



Still, with all this, which may be more or 

 less fanciful or impractical, the Cicada must 

 be of some use in the economies of nature, if 

 it can't be immediately utilized, or it proba- 

 bly never would have been created. That 

 use, whatever it may be, must be developed 

 through the restless ingenuity of man, and 

 that will be ultiraated when the necessity 

 arises. 



It has been said, although upon what speci- 

 fic authority I have not learned, that the 

 pupo and larva of the seventeen-year cicada, 

 possessing as it does a fine oily substance, has 

 been used in the manufacture of sqap. This 

 need not surprise us, for. many years ago 

 when the larva of the "cockchafer" be- 



