HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 249 
What is true of Beets is true of all other plants, and we shall endeavor 
on an early day to apply to the practice of grafting, the unquestionable facts 
above explained. — Crardener s Chronicle. 
THE MUSIC OF INSECTS. 
About midsummer, the majority of the singing birds have become silent ; 
but as one voice after another drops away, a new host of musicians of a 
different character take up the chorus, and their spinning melodies are 
suggestive of the early and later harvest, as the voices of the birds are 
associated with seed time and the season of flowers. In our climate the 
voices of no species of insects are very loud ; but when their vast multitudes 
are united in chorus, they may often be heard above the din and clatter of 
a busy town. Nature is exhaustless in the means by which she may effect 
the same end ; and birds, insects and reptiles are each provided with different 
but equally effective instruments for producing sounds. While birds and 
quadrupeds make sounds by means of a jjipe connecting with their lungs, 
the frogs are provided with a sort of bag-pipe, and the insects represent in 
their respective species the harpist, the violinist and the drummer. 
Thus there are several species that make sounds by the vibration of a 
membrane attached to their sides or to the shoulders of their wings. Such 
are most of the crickets and grasshoppers. Others of the same tribes rub 
their legs against a vibrating appendage connected with their sides, in 
humble imitation of the violin players : lastly, the drumming insects, like 
the woodticks, are provided with a little hammer, which they strike against 
the ceiling that forms their retreat. It seems to me that no man can be 
indifferent to the sounds and music of insects. Even the buzzing of flies 
about one's chamber or sitting room, has a soothing and tranquilizing 
influence ; and may be regarded as one of those circumstances provided by 
nature to relieve the world of that dead silence, which would otherwise 
render this earth a dreary and melancholy abode. We are so formed, that 
every sound in nature, except her notes of alarm, by habit becomes pleasing 
and assimilated to music ; and in the silence of winter, the increased delight 
afforded us by every remaining sound, is an evidence of this truth. The 
tiny hammering of the woodtick in the ceiling, the buzzing of flies, and, 
above all, the chirping of the cricket on the hearth, are among the poetical 
