THE GRASSHOPPER 



liberates itself from the shriveled remnant of its hatching 

 skin, and becomes a free new creature in the world. Being 

 a grasshopper, it proceeds to jump, and with its first ef- 

 forts clears a distance of four or five inches, something like 

 fifteen or twenty times the length of its own body. 



When the young locusts hatch under normal undisturbed 

 conditions, however, we must picture them as coming out 

 of the eggs into the cavernous spaces of the egg pod, and 

 all buried in the earth. They are by no means yet free 

 creatures, and they can gain their liberty only by burrow- 

 ing upward until they come out at the surface of the 

 ground. Of course, they are not very far beneath the sur- 

 face, and most of the way will be through the easily pene- 

 trated walls of the cells of the egg covering. But above the 

 latter is a thin layer of soil which may be hard-packed 

 after the winter's rains, and breaking through this layer 

 can not ordinarily be an easy task. Not many entomolo- 

 gists have closely watched the newly-hatched grasshopper 

 emerge from the earth, but Fabre has studied them under 

 artificial conditions, covered with soil in a glass tube. He 

 tells of the arduous efforts the tiny creatures make, press- 

 ing their delicate bodies upward through the earth by 

 means of their straightened hind legs, while the vesicles on 

 the back of the neck alternately contract and expand to 

 widen the passage above. All this, Fabre says, is done 

 before the hatching skin is shed, and it is only after the 

 surface is reached and the insect has attained the freedom 

 of the upper world that the inclosing membrane is cast off 

 and the limbs are unencumbered. 



The things that insects do and the ways in which they do 

 them are always interesting as mere facts, but how much 

 wiser might we be if we could discover why they do them ! 

 Consider the young locust buried in the earth, for example, 

 scarcely yet more than an embryo. How does it know 

 that it is not destined to live here in this dark cavity in 

 which it first finds itself? What force activates the mech- 

 anism that propels it through the earth? And finally, 



[9] 



