THE ORTHOPTERA. 
343 
for his musical apparatus. A male and female are on the ground, 
and have not yet completed their full growth. 
Everybody knows and can recognise a cricket, but naturalists 
appear to have done their best to make ordinary mortals confound 
crickets with grasshoppers, and both with locusts. Thus the French 
call crickets Grillidce , and the grasshoppers Locustes. The English 
call the grasshoppers Grillidce and Achetidce. There are Field 
Crickets, and House Crickets, and Mole Crickets, and they have 
great resemblances to the grasshoppers. 
The crickets are nocturnal insects, whose colours are dark 
and of brown and grey tints, but the grasshoppers and locusts 
like the light. They have all long and slender antennae, and legs 
adapted for jumping, and the elytra of the males have a large 
musical apparatus, and the females possess an elongated ovipositor. 
There are two principal types in this family — the crickets 
whose front legs and feet are simple in their structure, and the 
mole crickets, which have flattened fore legs. The musical sound 
of the crickets has given them their name, and we hear it by 
night in the fields and in houses hour after hour. These insects 
live very solitary existences, except when they are disposed foi 
that society which they suppose they can obtain by their ever- 
lasting chirp. Each one of them digs a hole, and does not leave 
it except during the night, and children in the fields, who know 
this, can often catch a field cricket by poking straws down cracks 
in the ground. The house cricket, which is of a yellow grey 
colour, and more or less marked with brown tints, is smaller 
than the other, and hides itself in holes and cracks in old walls 
and chimneys. It is a chilly insect, and it seeks its nourish- 
ment and delights to live in warm places. In towns it prefers 
bakeries and the neighbourhood of ovens, and in the country 
the most humble kitchens are favoured by its merry chirp. 
The engraving on the opposite page shows a cricket emerging 
from its hole, and a female on the bank above it ; the imperfect 
insects are on the ground in front. 
The mole crickets are large insects, and are wonderfully adapted 
for their particular method of life. They live under ground, and 
very rarely leave their holes. Their body is almost cylindrical, 
their feet are thick and short ; their front legs, which are also 
