110 THE INSECT WORLD. 
November or of December. But at this season of the year the 
Cicada has a long time since passed from life to death. When - 
one wanders along the outskirts of woods as early as the month 
of October, in the south of France, one finds the soil covered with 
dead Cicadas. La Fontaine’s Cigale then could not have found 
itself ‘fort dépourvue,” for the simple reason that it was already 
dead. 
“Hille alla crier famine 
Chez la Fourmi, sa voisine, 
La priant de lui preter 
Quelque grain pour subsister.” 
The ant is carnivorous, and although it likes honey, it has 
nothing to do with grains of wheat, nor with any other grain, of 
which, according to the fabulist, it had laid up a stock. On the 
other hand, the Cicada, which he blames for having 
“ Pas un seul petit morceau 
De mouche ou de vermisseau,” 
never dreamt of such victuals, for it lives entirely on the sap of 
large vegetables. The fables of the poet, who is called in France, 
ope never knows why, ‘‘ Le bon La Fontaine,” teem with errors 
of the same kind as those we have just pointed out. The habits 
of animals are nearly always represented as exactly the contrary 
to what they really are. To initiate himself into the mysteries of 
the habits of animals, La Fontaine certainly had neither the works 
of Buffon nor the memoirs of Réaumur, which had not then been 
written ; but had he not the book of Nature ? 
But it is time to mention the principal species of the Cicada. 
We will describe two: that of the Ash, which lives on those trees 
in the south of France; and that of the Manna Ash, which is very 
common in the south-east of France. It is particularly plentiful 
in the forests of pines which abound between Bayonne and Bor- 
deaux. It is on these two species of Cicada that Réaumur made 
the beautiful observations of which we gave a summary above. 
The Cicada plebeia or Tettigonia fraxini, very common in Pro- 
vence, is found, though rarely, in the forest of Fontainebleau, 
oceasionally in La Brie. It is of a grey yellow below, black 
above; the head and thorax are marked or striped with black. 
