153 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



When experiments of this sort are making, it should always be 

 remembered that weather and the time of day have a vast influence on 

 an echo ; for a dull, heavy, moist air deadens and clogs the sound ; and 

 hot sunshine renders the air thin and weak, and deprives it of all its 

 springiness, and a ruffling wind quite defeats the whole. In a still, 

 clear, dewy evening the air is most elastic ; and perhaps the later the 

 hour the more so. 



Echo has always been so amusing to the imagination, that the poets 

 have personified her ; and in their hands she has been the occasion of 

 many a beautiful fiction. Nor need the gravest man be ashamed to 

 appear taken with such a phenomenon, since it may become the 

 subject of philosophical or mathematical inquiries. 



One should have imagined that echoes, if not entertaining, must at 

 least have been harmless and inoffensive ; yet,Yirgil advances a strange 

 notion, that they are injurious to bees. After enumerating some 

 probable and reasonable annoyances, such as prudent owners would 

 wish far removed from their bee-gardens, he adds 



" aut ubi concava 



Saxa sonant, vocisque offensa resultat imago. 



pulsu 



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, a place of responses 

 and 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 showing the least sensibility 

 or resentment.* 



Some time since its discovery this echo is become totally silent, 

 though the object, or hop-kiln, remains ; nor is there any mystery in 



* Insects are now proved to be sensible of the impression of sounds. Mr. 

 Bennet has quoted experiments 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 towards him." Insects being in possession of 

 the power of emitting sounds, these must be subservient for some purpose, and 

 from the above experiments we find them to be responded to. It is remarkable 

 that in the Cicadas the females are destitute of the sound-making organs, 

 "Yet," writes Owen, in one of the latest general summaries of structure 



8843), "the precise organ has not yet been definitely recognised." And Messrs, 

 ould and Agassiz state the grasshopper, for instance, to have a sort of ear, no 

 longer situated in the head as with other animals, but in the legs, and from this 

 fact we may be allowed to suppose that if no organ of hearing has yet been found 

 in most insects, it is because it has been sought for in the head only. " 



