VOCAL £ INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC OF INSECTS. 147 



where its resonant " zig-zig" sounds incessantly like the jingle 

 of horse-bells and rattling of harness. We are given to believe 

 that a dense cloud of Leaf-Crickets, and, judging by the illustra- 

 tion, the species in question, wafted on Aug. 23rd, 1711, from 

 the sea opposite the Island of Elba and settled down on the 

 Italian marshes of the Piombina, where for five years they 

 regularly deposited their eggs in August, and a young brood 

 appeared the following April to continue the work of destruction. 

 Chelidoptera albopunctata , a smallish greyish or brownish Leaf- 

 Cricket that lurks, spider-like, in the nettle-clumps, is omnipresent 

 in Europe, and I found it at home on the ferny declivities around 

 the Gouffre in the Island of Guernsey, not yet exploited for 

 house-building ; among the Calais sandhills I have seen a be- 

 lated individual chirruping on the tops of the reeds in the sun- 

 shine, but its habits are vespertine. When staying at Nantes in 

 August, 1891, I had a male in my bedroom as a distraction 

 from the uncongenial drama of the hostelry, and in the small 

 hours of the night I studied its instrumentation, which consisted of 

 a series of " cricks," from fifty to five hundred, which resembled 

 the winding up of a watch. Near Vienna Chelidoptera bicolor 

 sustains the reputation of its kind for nutmeg-grater music ; its 

 female has no ovipositor ; in the course of ages she probably 

 made no use of it, and so lost the use of it. C. tessellata I have 

 found at Valladolid as early as July 12th, and I met with it at 

 Leon and Nantes in August. 



In the seventies General Twemloe, a geologist of the old 

 school, was lecturing on the chalk-flints that had been washed 

 into his garden at Guildford, which he was then trying to con- 

 vince Professor Owen were antediluvian monkeys and cocoanuts, 

 ladies' boots and chignons, from the aromatic bowers of Persia ; 

 and about the same time a notice appeared concerning seams of 

 pipe-clay containing the leaves of trees that overshadowed the 

 banks of our Eocene river at Poole Harbour, recently discovered 

 by Mr. Starkie Gardner. Hearing of this, I joined a party of 

 excursionists to Bournemouth, and, digging about in the face of 

 the cliff with a pocket-knife, I unearthed what to my under- 

 standing 'seemed to be the impressions of some willow-leaves. 

 This discovery was sufficiently prosaic, and, as the sun was hot, 

 I lay down to slumber on a heathery slope where the cooling sea 



