426 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



THE VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC OF 



INSECTS. 



By A. H. Swinton. 



(Continued from p. 306.) 



I remember, when in the Island of Mauritius, being presented 

 with a live stick-insect, which, much to rny astonishment, sud- 

 denly expanded its fan-folded wings with a silken rustle and 

 seemed to leap out of the window. Mr. Wood-Mason asserted 

 that one — a Pterinoxylus — made a sound by rubbing a rasp on the 

 costal vein of its wings across their diminutive covers, which 

 was augmented by a talc spot. Entombed in the coal-fields, the 

 stick-insects, grasshoppers, and cockroaches seem to blend with 

 the dragon-flies and stone-flies. Nowadays Corydalis comuta 

 looks like the ghost of a bygone insect with jaws, and the ant- 

 lions only retain them in their youth. A bit of wing belonging 

 to the Corydalis brogniarti of Audouin, that dwelt among the 

 gigantic horsetails of Colebrookdale, I once suggested to Dr. 

 Henry Woodward had traces of a circular musical comb, but 

 later on a scientist pronounced this to be the mark of the 

 fracture in the claystone nodule that enclosed it ; while, from 

 the nature of their inhabitants, it remains more than probable 

 that these early swamps resounded with the savage shrill of 

 insect instrumentation. 



The caddis-flies, again, blend with the scaly china-marks, 

 bagworms, and clothes-moths, the Acentropus niveus found in 

 some English ponds being a connecting-link. Among the moths 

 that spin cocoons a few have bladders under their wings that 

 resemble the drums of the Cicadas, and it is said they elicit 

 sounds from these by rubbing them with their hind legs, but 

 they have not any very conspicuous ear-cavities. They are 

 possessed by the males of two rosy-flushed tiger-moths of the 

 Mediterranean seaboard {Cymbalophora pudica and C. certzeni). 

 DeVilliers compared the sound made by the former, when flying 



