A THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
of a voice that causes love to wander away! And I 
will give thee for morning gifts a leek ever fresh, 
and drops of dew, cut up small for thy mouth.” 
The locusts and short-horned grasshoppers (A cridvidae),. 
as you know, rub with their hind legs up and down some of" 
the projecting nervures on the sides of the closed elytra or fore. 
wings to produce the sounds with which we are as familiar ay 
the Greeks. 
Here is also a record which any of us would be glad tp, 
publish in our journal: A nightingale has caught a cicady 
which it has taken to its nest. Evenus calls the nightingale 
“Attic Maiden,’’ because in ureek mythology the nightingale. 
was a daughter of an ancient king of Attica. This is the 
poem :— 
“Thou, Attic maiden, honey-fed, hast chirping 
seized a chirping cicada, and bearest it to thy un- 
fledged young—thou, a twitterer, the twitterer; 
thou, the winged, well-winged; thou, a stranger, 
the stranger; thou, a summer child, the summer 
child! Wilt thou not quickly throw it away? For 
it is not right, it is not just, that those engaged in 
song should perish by the mouths of those engaged 
in song! F 
The Greeks were well aware that only the male cicada: 
sings, for one poet has written, ‘“Happy are the cicadas’ lives, 
for they all have voiceless wives.’’ They were very interested. 
in the cicadae, grasshoppers, and some of the night crickets, 
Some of the locusts they kept in cages made of plaited reeds. 
Lafcadio Hearn “points out that the same thing is done in. 
Tokio to-day, and that while the Greeks fed the captives on 
leeks, the Japanese provide theirs with a similar kind of food. 
Most of the poems referring to these insects are from. 
2,000 to 2,500 years old. 
The references to objects of natural history in Homer- 
are mainly as similes; they are not described as a naturalist 
would depict them. Lions predominate in the Homeric legend,. — 
indeed Homer must have been well acquainted with them, 
Though they have not been known in Europe for many cen- 
turies, Herodotus mentions that they abounded on the rocky- | 
portions of Macedonia and Thessaly. They attacked the bag- 
gage animals of Xerxes’ army on his march through those dis- 
tricts into Greece, and fell specially on the camels. The his- 
torian naively wonders at them abandoning their habits of 
preying on horses and oxen and attacking camels which they 
had never seen. Why should not a lion have a change of 
diet? Of insects he refers to the gadfly, which attacked the- 
herds, and a worm or weevil which injured the wood of 
