224 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
they move ^'volatu undoso" in waves or curves, like wood- 
peckers, opening and shutting their wings at every stroke, and 
so are always rising or sinking. 
When they increase to a great degree, as they did once in the 
house where I am now writing, they become noisome pests, 
flying into the candles, and dashing into people's faces ; but may 
be blasted and destroyed by gunpowder discharged into their 
crevices and crannies. In families, at such times, they are, like 
Pharaoh's plague of frogs, — "in their bedchambers, and upon 
their beds, and in their ovens, and in their kneading-troughs."* 
Their shrilling noise is occasioned by a brisk attrition of their 
wings. Cats catch hearth crickets, and, playing with them as 
they do with mice, devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, 
like wasps, by phials half filled with beer, or any liquid, and set 
in their haunts ; for, being always eager to drink, they will crowd 
in till the bottles are full. 
LETTER XLVIII To the Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON. 
Selborne. 
Elow diversified are the modes of life not only of incongruous 
but even of congenerous animals ; and yet their specific distinc- 
tions are not more various than their propensities. Thus, while 
the field-cricket delights in sunny dry banks, and the house- 
cricket rejoices amidst the glowing heat of the kitchen hearth or 
oven, the gryllus gryllo talpaf (the 
mole-cricket), haunts moist meadows, 
and frequent the sides of ponds and 
banks of streams, performing all its 
functions in a swampy wet soil. With 
a pair of fore-feet, curiously adapted 
to the purpose, it burrows and works 
under ground like the mole, raising a Mole-cricket, 
ridge as it proceeds, but seldom throwing up hillocks. 
As mole-crickets often infest gardens by the sides of canals, 
they are unwelcome guests to the gardener, raising up ridges in 
their subterraneous progress, and rendering the walks unsightly. 
* Exod. viii. 3. 
t Gryllotalpa vulgaris, of modern fcvstematists. — Ed. 
