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BONSDORF ON THE ANTENNAE OF INSECTS. 



ancients, our opponents may explain why those who take pleasure in 

 the study of insects remain so unaccountably silent if it be so. 



Not once, but a hundred times, I have tried by experiment the 

 acuteness of hearing in insects, as often as I have delighted my mind 

 with contemplating the beauties of nature in study during the summer 

 nights, destined otherwise for the purpose of recruiting exhausted 

 strength. In such cases, how much attention is requisite to avoid 

 disturbing the roaming moths, and how rapid is their flight on the 

 least noise being made, even before I could have imagined that the 

 noise could have reached their ears. 



Unless, therefore, every circumstance misleads me, the inference is 

 correct, that there is a constant relation between the power of ex- 

 pressing various sounds and the power of perceiving the same ; and this 

 is strengthened the moire as it is more clearly seen and proved by sad 

 experience in the case of a man born deaf and dumb, which appears to 

 prove that hearing is the inseparable companion of the power of uttering 

 sound. 



Some, however, object to this opinion, and I am very much surprised 

 to find Linnaeus among the number. Though convinced by arguments 

 and circumstances of so much weight and authority, yet they are 

 anxious to maintain the opinion they have once adopted, — namely, that 

 insects perceive noises and louder sounds equally with fishes, but 

 evidently in another manner than by hearing, which they think cannot 

 be conceived without ears, no more than sight without eyes. 



I cannot clearly see the utility of referring the perception of sounds 

 in insects to a certain spirit or other diffused through their bodies, as 

 alleged by Franzius, and obeying by its tremors the agitation of the 

 air. Ardern asserts something similar with respect to fishes, and in 

 the same way we see timorous men tremble at terrific and unexpected 

 sounds ; but for exciting such tumultuary feelings, the slender voices 

 of insects are hardly sufficient, and murmurs uttered by a feeble voice, 

 especially when that explication supposes a very sensitive constitution 

 of the nerves might, were this true, be exceedingly inconvenient to 

 insects. They, indeed, persuade themselves on slight grounds, that all 

 the senses have organs of peculiar form as mutually dependent as the 

 sense of hearing is on the ear, and as feeling on the power of perception ; 

 and they think that the sensation is necessarily changed with the 

 change of the instrument, as creating on that account a new, and as to 

 its nature, an incomprehensible kind of sensation, neither to be com- 



