124 Cockroaches, Locusts, Grasshoppers, and Crickets 
keep up 
offers its 
the chorus. At home, in house and garden, the domestic cricket 
music to the already over-full ears. All this choiring is done by 
singers without a voice; that is, without the 
production of sound from the throat and 
mouth by means of vocal cords set into vi¬ 
bration by air. Insects are orchestral per¬ 
formers, using their legs and wings, for the 
most part, to make their music. When the lo¬ 
cust sings while at rest, it is rasping the inner 
surface of the broad hind thighs „ across the 
roughened outer surface of the folded fore 
wings; when it “clacks” in the air, it is strik¬ 
ing the front margin of the hind wing back 
and forth past the hinder margin of the 
thickened fore wings. When the cricket 
shrills on the hearth, or anywhere else, he , for 
only the male crickets have the musical gift, is holding 
his fore wings up over his body at an angle with it of 
about 45 0 and is rubbing together the upper surfaces of 
the basal region of the fore wings, which are specially 
modified for this purpose. The tree-crickets, katydids, 
and meadow green grasshoppers have, in the males, 
the same general sort of music-making apparatus as 
the cricket, and sing by similarly rasping or rubbing 
together the modified parts of the fore wings. This 
Fig. 155. —Longitudinal section through head and neck of locust, 
showing disposition of alimentary canal, brain, and sub- 
oesophageal ganglion. (After Snodgrass; much enlarged.) 
music-making by rasping is called stridulation, and for the most part 
insect stridulation is strictly strident, and sounds to better advantage in the » 
field than it would from caged songsters in the parlor. 
