56 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol.X 



used in America, it might well be claimed by somebody like the 

 Descendants of the Mayflower. 



In the Anthology it is declared that Phoebus loved the Tettix 

 and gave it a shrill song. " Old age does not wear it down, the 

 clever one, earth born, song loving, without suffering, having 

 flesh without blood, nearly equal to the Gods." It will also be 

 observed that the Tettix required no food except the dew. Even 

 the natural historian of Greece asserts that it eats nothing else. 



The earliest clear mention is in Hesiod, the farmer poet of 

 perhaps 800 B. C. : " When the dusky songster, Tettix, perched 

 upon a green bough, begins to sing of summer for man, — Tettix, 

 whose meat and drink is the life-giving dew, — both all day long 

 and in the morning pours his voice in the fiercest heat." At- 

 tributed to Anacreon, about 550 B. C, is this: "We deem you, 

 Tettix, happy, because, having drunk, like a king, a little dew 

 you lalage on the tops of trees, for whatever you see in the fields 

 and whatever the seasons produce is yours, O little friend to the 

 land tillers, you that harmest none." Meleager says : " Thou 

 voiced Tettex, drunk with drops of dew, singest of the Muse, 

 thou that livest in the country and prattles in the desert, and 

 sitting with thy serrated legs on the tops of petals gives out 

 melody from thy dusky skin." Theocritus, muse of the Sicilian 

 shepherds, " the Tettix vexes the reapers." " The Tettix watches 

 the shepherds from the tree tops." Still again : " the fire-colored 

 Tettix on the shady branches toils at chirping." Poetic license. 

 No Tettix is fire-colored and none seems to toil at singing. 



Even the beloved of the Gods may not be free from sorrow. 

 The Tettix protests, through the Anthology : " Why, shepherds, 

 do you shamelessly drag me, Tettix, captured from dewy boughs, 

 lover of solitude, roadside songster of the nymphs, chirping 

 shrilly in the mid-day heat on the mountains ? " Theocritus again : 

 "the buzzing Sphex against the Tettix," having watched, no 

 doubt, the wasps stinging the Cicada and dragging it to paralyzed 

 life imprisonment until the young wasps might grow to maturity 

 by inflicting the most cruel of deaths on its live food. Evenus, 

 about 400 B. C., protests to the nightingale who has seized a 

 Cicada, bearing it to its unfledged birdlings : " It is not right that 



