a84 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 



