XVII 



Instrumental music, one with vocal music in its origin — Instru- 

 mental music in the lower animals — Insects — Cicada — Locusts 

 — CEcanthus; silence, moonlight and tears made audible — 

 Locusta viridissima and music in insects and man — A robber 

 fly's musical performance — Of insect wing-music generally 

 — Hover-fly — Birds as instrumentalists — Storks and wood- 

 peckers — Wings as instruments of music — Wing slappings 

 and clappings — Bleating of snipe — Origin of wing-music. 



THE second part of the last chapter was not 

 a digression, although, in considering the rela- 

 tion between music and poetry, we seemed to 

 have got quite away from our own relationship with 

 the lower animals ; but no sooner do we come to the 

 subject of instrumental music than we find ourselves 

 once more mixed up with them. And this, to my 

 thinking, is, in our species, the better half of music. 

 In birds, owing to their soft feathery covering and 

 to their hands and arms being lost in their wings, 

 music is mainly from the throat: so it is with the 

 batrachians that blow themselves out like bladders 

 to get them "a chamber of resonance" to pour out 

 their souls in vocal sounds. Here in England with 

 our two modest frogs and a pair of toads, we know 

 little of the power of voice in that order of beings 

 and the pure musical sounds emitted by some species. 

 Insect music, on the other hand, is almost wholly 

 instrumental and would be entirely so but for the fact 



that in some species the sounds are produced not solely 



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