ARTIFICIAL OR ARTICULATE LANGUAGE. 



267 



them to the other ; and often conceals himself in some adjoining^ crevice 

 where he cannot see the poor animal as it becomes ensnared: but he sits 

 wistfully listening- for the buzzing- noise that assures him the fly is entangled, 

 and is fluttering to make its escape. He hears the well-known signal, sallies 

 forth from his concealment, and riots on the spoil that has fallen into his 

 power, with all the eagerness and ferocity that distinguish the most rapacious 

 quadrupeds. 



Whether fishes possess any similar means of communicating their feelings 

 we know not. Reasoning from the facts that a few of them occasionally 

 utter tones of distress when first taken ; and that they possess an organ of 

 hearing, and live in a medium well adapted to the propagation of sound, it 

 is generally conjectured that they have a language of some kind or other : 

 but our knowledge of their usual habits, from their residing in a different ele- 

 ment from our own, is so imperfect, that we have no positive data to build upon. 



It is a curious fact, that many animals, which are naturally dumb in the 

 widest sense of the word, are possessed of a power of producing sounds, by 

 the use of some external organ or foreign instrument, that forms a very con- 

 venient substitute for a natural tongue. I have formerly had occasion to 

 observe this of the goat-chaff'er or cerambyx, which, whenever taken, utters 

 a shrill shriek of fright, by rubbing its chest against its wing-shells, and the 

 upper part of its abdomen ; and of the ptinus Jatidicus, or death-watch, that 

 produces its measured and, to the superstitious, alarming strokes, by striking 

 its horny frontlet against the bed-post, or any other hard substance in which 

 it takes its stand. The termes Pulsatorium, or tick-watch, is an insect of a 

 different order, but armed with a similar apparatus, and makes a noise by the 

 same means, like the ticking of a watch, from the old wood or decayed fur- 

 niture in which it loves to reside, and by which it endeavours to entice the 

 other sex to its company. And it is a singular circumstance, which I shall 

 merely glance at in passing, that some species of the woodpecker, in the 

 breeding season, in consequence of the feebleness of its natural voice, makes 

 use of a similar kind of call, by strong reiterated strokes of the bill against 

 a dead sonorous branch of a tree. 



The most astonishing instance, however, of sound excited in this manner, 

 is that made by two species of Italian grasshoppers : the cicada Pleheja^ and 

 c. orni. The music of these insects (which is confined to the male) is pro- 

 duced by a very singular apparatus, that consists of several winding cells 

 under the abdomen, separated by different membranes, and opening exter- 

 nally by two narrow valves. In the centre of these cells is contained a 

 scaly sonorous triangle, and exterior to them are two vigorous muscles, by 

 the action of which the cells are supplied with air through one of the valves, 

 and so powerfully reverberate it against the triangle as to produce the notes 

 of which the grasshopper's song consists ; and which is sometimes so loud 

 that a single insect, hung in a cage, has almost drowned the voices of a large 

 company. This song is also the madrigal of love. 



But, highly tempting as it is, I must not pursue this part of our subject 

 any farther. From the birds of the field to the grasshopper, from the bee to 

 the fly, every attentive naturalist observes, in every tribe, a vast compass of 

 accentuation, and comprehends the meaning of a great variety of their tones. 

 But what is the little that we understand to what is understood by them- 

 selves, formed with similar organs, in a thousand instances more acute than our 

 own, actuated by similar wants, and proposing to themselves similar pursuits ! 



What the natural language of man is we know not. There can be no 

 doubt, however, that if, by a miracle, he were to be deprived of all artificial 

 language, there would still remain to him, from the perfection of his vocal 

 organs, a language of this kind, and of far greater extent and variety than 

 that of any other animal. 



But some schools of philosophers have not been satisfied with contem- 

 plating such an idea hypothetically ; they have boldly imbodied it into a fact, 

 and have contended, and still continue to contend, that such a language has 

 actually existed ; and that it constituted the sole language of man on his first 



