MOLE-CRICKET. 
225 
If they take to the kitchen quarters, they occasion great damage 
among the plants and roots, by destroying whole beds of cab- 
bages, young legumes, and flowers. When dug out they seem 
very slow and helpless, and make no use of their wings by day ; 
but at night they come abroad, and make long excursions, as I 
have been convinced by finding stragglers, in a morning, in im- 
probable places. In fine weather, about the middle of April, 
and just at the close of day, they begin to solace themselves 
with a low, dull, jarring note, continued for a long time without 
interruption, and not unlike the chattering of the fern-owl, or 
goat-sucker, but more inward.* 
About the beginning of May they lay their eggs, as I was once 
an eye-witness : for a gardener at a house, where I was on a 
visit, happening to be mowing, on the 6th of that month, by the 
side of a canal, his scythe struck too deep, pared off a large piece 
of turf, and laid open to view a curious scene of domestic 
economy : 
ingentem lato dedit ore fenestram : 
Apparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt; 
Apparent penetralia. " 
There were many caverns and winding passages leading to a 
kind of chamber, neatly smoothed and rounded, and about the 
size of a moderate snuff-box. Within this secret nursery were 
deposited near a hundred eggs of a dirty yellow colour, and 
enveloped in a tough skin, but too lately excluded to contain 
any rudiments of young, being full of a viscous substance. The 
eggs lay but shallow, and within the influence of the sun, just 
under a little heap of fresh-moved mould, like that which is 
raised by ants. 
When mole-crickets fly they move " cursu undosOy' rising and 
falling in curves, like the other species mentioned before. In 
different parts of this kingdom people call them fen-crickets, 
churr- worms, and eve-churrs, all very apposite names. 
Anatomists, who have examined the intestines of these insects, 
astonish me with their accounts ; for they say that, from the 
structure, position, and number of their stomachs, or maws, 
there seems to be good reason to suppose that this and the two 
former species ruminate or chew the cud like many quadrupeds If 
* Or it may be compared to the sibilant thrill of the locustelle. — Ed. 
f This erroneous and strange notion must have arisen from the circumstance of these insects 
being occasionallj^ noticed to move their jaws when not feeding. — Ed. 
a 
