122 The Animal Mind 



beetle is swimming about, be made suddenly louder, the 

 speed of the insect's movements visibly increases. It is 

 going rather far, however, to pass from the evidence 

 that insects discriminate sounds made by their own 

 species from other sounds to the conclusion that "they 

 like us have the capacity to analyze, at least to a certain 

 degree, these peculiar clangs or noises, and to distinguish 

 clearly from one another the partial tones that compose 

 them" (264). 



Tower thought that he had observed the potato beetle 

 reacting to the sound of a tuning fork (717). Will noted 

 responses from a male beetle to the stridulation of a female 

 of its species enclosed in a box 15 cm. away (786). RMl 

 made the suggestion that the organs which <Graber 

 called chordotonal organs, and which contain a fibre 

 stretched between two points of the integument, represent 

 a kind of transition between " Gemdngefithl" and hearing) 

 In support he offers the following evidence : the fibres re- 

 semble the tendons in which some muscles end, and are very 

 likely developed from tendons ; the organs exist in insects 

 that have no use for hearing, such as grubs shut up in fruits ; 

 insects have not been shown to respond to pure tones, but 

 only to noises, such as the cricket's chirping, which for us 

 affect Gemeingefiihl. Further, (there is no evidence that 

 hearing ever guides insects to each other; in short, it is 

 but a rudimentary sense, and its organs are those which 

 serve also to register muscular activity. It is, in insects, a 

 "refined muscular sense^ (624). Regen (630) demon- 

 strated very prettily an apparently auditory reaction in the 

 female cricket. He placed in the centre of a wide area on 

 the floor two glass vessels, one lined with black paper, 

 the other transparent. In the opaque vessel he placed a 

 chirping male; in the transparent vessel a quiet male. 



