158 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
When experiments of this sort are making, it should always be 
remembered that weather and the time of day have a vast influence on 
an echo ; for a dull, heavy, moist air deadens and clogs the sound ; and 
hot sunshine renders the air thin and weak, and deprives it of all its 
springiness, and a rufiiing wind quite defeats the whole. In a still, 
clear, dewy evening the air is most elastic ; and perhaps the later the 
hour the more so. 
Echo has always been so amusing to the imagination, that the poets 
have personified her ; and in their hands she has been the occasion of 
many a beautiful fiction. IN'or need the gravest man be ashamed to 
appear taken with such a phenomenon, since it may become the 
subject of philosophical or mathematical inquiries. 
One should have imagined that echoes, if not entertaining, must at 
least have been harmless and inoffensive ; yet,yirgil advances a strange 
notion, that they are injurious to bees. After enumerating some 
probable and reasonable annoyances, such as prudent owners would 
wish far removed from their bee-gardens, he adds — 
" aut ubi concava pulsu 
Saxa sonant, vocisque offensa resultat imago." 
This wild and fanciful assertion will hardly be admitted by the 
philosophers of these days, especially as they all now seem agreed 
that insects are not furnished with any organs of hearing at all. But 
if it should be urged, that though they cannot hear yet perhaps they 
may feel the repercussions of sounds, I grant it is possible they may. 
Yet that these impressions are distasteful or hurtful, I deny, because 
bees, in good summers, thrive well in my outlet, where the echoes are 
very strong ; for this village is another Anathoth, a place of responses 
and echoes. Besides, it does not appear from experiment that bees 
are in any way capable of being aflfected by sounds ; for I have often 
tried my own with a large speaking-trumpet held close to their hives, 
and with such an exertion of voice as would have haled a ship at the 
distance of a mile, and still these insects pursued their various 
employments undisturbed, and without showing the least sensibility 
or resentment.* 
Some time since its discovery this echo is become totally silent, 
though the object, or hop-kiln, remains ; nor is there any mystery in 
* Insects are now proved to be sensible of the impression of sounds. Mr. 
Bennet has quoted experiments of Brunelli in proof; he learned to imitate the 
chirping of grasshoppers, and when he did this at the door of a closet in which 
they were kept they soon began to answer him. ''He afterwards enclosed a 
male grasshopper in a box, and placed it in one part of his garden, leaving a 
female at liberty in a distant part of it ; as soon as the male began to sing the 
female immediately hopped away towards him. " Insects being in possession of 
the power of emitting sounds, these must be subservient for some purpose, and 
from the above experiments we find them to be responded to. It is remarkable 
that in the Cicadge the females are destitute of the sound-making organs, 
"Yet," writes Owen, in one of the latest general summaries of structure 
(1843), "the precise organ has not yet been definitely recognised. " And Messrs. 
Gould and Agassiz state the grasshopper, for instance, to have a sort of ear, no 
longer situated in the head as with other animals, but in the legs, and from this 
fact we may be allowed to suppose that if no organ of hearing has yet been found 
in most insects, it is because it has been sought for in the head only." 
