INSECT WING-MUSIC 291 



through most of it, it is evident that it also affords 

 her some pleasure to hear it, since at intervals, 

 especially during the highest and brightest note, she 

 responds, beating time, as it were, with a measured 

 buzz, buzz, buzz, and at each repetition of the sound 

 throwing her wings out at right angles to her upright 

 body. I have watched and listened to this perform- 

 ance hundreds of times since my childhood without 

 losing interest in it. It is the only humming and 

 dancing performance in insects known to me which 

 may be described as a set artistic one and on a par 

 with bird performances of a similar character. But I 

 believe that all dipterous insects, albeit they have not 

 evolved any such set performances, yet in their freer 

 way do find the chief pleasure of their brief lives in 

 aerial exercises with the accompaniment of music. 

 Flies, we are informed by the authorities, have three 

 different tones in humming when on the wing. I 

 believe that if we had a sense of hearing capable of 

 catching the finer tones we could say that they had 

 many more than three; that if by means of some 

 invention the sound of a cloud of midges or gnats 

 or of house-flies in a room, perpetually revolving 

 in their aerial dances, could be fully conveyed to our 

 sense, it would be a tangle of an infinite number of 

 individual sounds as varied as the concert singing 

 of a multitude of linnets or starlings. On any hot 

 summer's day in the open country you hear a loud 

 continuous hum from aloft; it is the sound of 

 tens of thousands of individual sounds of insects 

 flying high in the air all fused into one sound. 



