THE CLIMBING CRICKETS. 
153 
This is one of the social species, wliich, associated together 
in great swarms, and feeding in common, fre- 
^ . ’ Fig. 70. 
quent our meadows and road-sides, and, so far 
fi’om avoiding the light of day, seem to be quite 
as fond of it as others are of darkness. It may 
be called Aclieta viitata* (Fig. TO,) the striped 
cricket. 
These kinds of crickets live upon the ground, 
and among the grass and low herbage; but there 
is another kind which inhabits the stems and branches of 
shrubs and trees, concealing itself during the davtime among 
the leaves, or in the flowers of these plants. Some Isabella 
grape-vines, which were trained against one side of my 
house, were much resorted to by these delicate and noisy 
little crickets. The males begin to be heard about the 
middle of August, and do not leave us until after the 
middle of September. Their shrilling is excessively loud, 
and is produced, like that of other crickets, by the rubbing of 
one wing-cover against the other ; but they generally raise 
their vdng-covers much higher than other crickets do while 
they are playing. These wing-covers, in the males, are also 
veiy large, and as long as the wings ; they are exceedingly 
thin, and perfectly transparent, and have the horizontal 
portion dirfded into four unequal parts by three oblique 
raised lines, two of which are parallel and form an angle with 
the anterior line. The antenn^e and legs are both very long 
and slender, the hinder thighs being much smaller in pro¬ 
portion than those of other crickets, and the hindmost feet 
have fom’ instead of three joints. The two bristle-formed 
appendages at the end of the body are as long as the piercer, 
and the latter is only about half the length of the body, while, 
in the ground-crickets, the piercer is usually as long as 
the body, or longer. These insects have, therefore, been sep¬ 
arated from the other crickets, under the generical name of 
(Ecantlius, a word which means inhabiting flowers. They 
* It belongs to M. Serville’s new genus Ntmobius. 
20 
