Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions. / A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances.

by Frank Cowan

Cicadidæ—Harvest-flies.

The Cicadas, C. plebeja, Linn., called by the ancient Greeks, (by whom, as well as by the Chinese, they were kept in cages for the sake of their song,) Tettix, seem to have been the favorites of every Grecian bard, from Homer and Hesiod to Anacreon and Theocritus. Supposed to be perfectly harmless, and to live only upon dew, they were addressed by the most endearing epithets, and were regarded as almost divine. Thus sings the muse of Anacreon:

Happy creature! what below

Can more happy live than thou?

Seated on thy leafy throne,

Summer weaves thy verdant crown.

Sipping o’er the pearly lawn,

The fragrant nectar of the dawn,

Little tales thou lov’st to sing,

Tales of mirth—an insect king.

Thine the treasures of the field,

All thy own the seasons yield;

Nature paints thee for the year,

Songster to the shepherds dear;

Innocent, of placid fame,

What of man can boast the same?

Thine the loudest voice of praise,

Harbinger of fruitful days;

Darling of the tuneful nine,

Phœbus is thy sire divine;

Phœbus to thy note has given

Music from the spheres of heaven;

Happy most as first of earth,

All thy hours are peace and mirth;

Cares nor pains to thee belong,

Thou alone art ever young.

Thine the pure immortal vein,

Blood nor flesh thy life sustain;

Rich in spirits—health thy feast,

Thou art a demi-god at least.

But the old witticism, attributed to the incorrigible Rhodian sensualist, Xenarchus, gives quite a different reason to account for the supposed happiness of these insects:

Happy the Cicadas’ lives,

Since they all have voiceless wives![865]

Plutarch, reasoning upon that singular Pythagorean precept which forbid the wife to admit swallows in the house, remarks: “Consider, and see whether the swallow be not odious and impious … because she feedeth upon flesh, and, besides, killeth and devoureth especially grasshoppers (Cicadas), which are sacred and musical.”[866]

The Athenians were so attached to the Cicadas, that their elders were accustomed to fasten golden images of them in their hair. Thucidides incidentally remarks that this custom ceased but a little before his time. He adds, also, that the fashion prevailed, too, for a long time with the elders of the Ionians, from their affinity to the Athenians.[867]

This singular form, for their ornamental combs, seems to have been adopted originally from the predilection of the Athenians for whatever bore any affinity to themselves, who boasted of being autochthones or aboriginal. It is sung of the Athenians:

Blithe race! whose mantles were bedeck’d

With golden grasshoppers, in sign that they

Had sprung, like those bright creatures, from the soil

Whereon their endless generations dwelt.

Mr. Michell supposes the Athenians to have imitated in this instance their prototypes, the Egyptians; for as they, he adds, wore their favorite symbol, the Scarabæus, in this manner, so Attic pride set up a rival in the head-dress thus introduced by Cecrops and his followers.[868]

From a very ancient writer,[869] we have similar ornaments

ascribed to the Samians. They also most probably derived this fashion from the early Athenians.[870]

It seems, from the following lines of Asius,[871] that Cicadas were also worn as ornaments on dresses:

Clad in magnificent robes, whose snow-white folds

Reach’d to the ground of the extensive earth,

And golden knobs on them like grasshoppers.

The sound of the Cicada and that of the harp were called by the Greeks by one and the same name; and a Cicada sitting upon a harp was the usual emblem of the science of music. This was accounted for by the following very pleasing and elegant tale: Two rival musicians, Eunomis of Locris and Aristo of Rhegium, when alternately playing upon the harp, the former was so unfortunate as to break a string of his instrument, and by which accident would certainly have lost the prize, when a Cicada, flying to him and sitting upon his harp, supplied the place of the broken string with its melodious voice, and so secured to him an easy victory over his antagonist.[872]

To excel the Cicada in singing was the highest commendation of a singer, and the music of Plato’s eloquence was only comparable to the voice of this insect. Homer compared his good orators to the Cicadæ, “which, in the woods, sitting on a tree, send forth a delicate voice.”[873] But Virgil speaks of them as insects of a disagreeable and stridulous tone, and accuses them of bursting the very shrubs with their noise,—

Et cantu querulæ rumpent arbusta Cicadæ.[874]

Moufet says: “The Cicadæ, abounding in the end of spring,

do foretel a sickly year to come, not that they are the cause of putrefaction in themselves, but only shew plenty of putrid matter to be, when there is such store of them appear. Oftentimes their coming and singing doth portend the happy state of things: so also says Theocritus. Niphus saith that what year but few of them are to be seen, they presage dearness of victuals, and scarcity of all things else.…

“The Egyptians, by a Cicada painted, understood a priest and an holy man; the latter makers of hieroglyphics sometimes will have them to signifie musicians, sometimes pratlers or talkative companions, but very fondly. How ever the matter be, the Cicada hath sung very well of herself, in my judgement, in this following distich:

Although I am an insect very small,

Yet with great virtue am endow’d withall.”[875]

Sir G. Staunton, in his account of China, remarks: “The shops of Hai-tien, in addition to necessaries, abounded in toys and trifles, calculated to amuse the rich and idle of both sexes, even to cages containing insects, such as the noisy Cicada, and a large species of the Gryllus.”[876]

S. Wells Williams tells us that the Chinese boys often capture the male Cicada of their country, and tie a straw around the abdomen, so as to irritate the sounding apparatus, and carry it through the streets in this predicament, to the great annoyance of every one, for the stridulous sound of this insect is of deafening loudness.[877]

When in Quincy, Illinois, in the summer of 1864, I was shown by a boy a toy, which he called a “Locust,” with which he imitated the loud rattling noise of the Cicada septemdecim with great accuracy. It consisted of a horse-hair

tied to the end of a short stick, and looped in a cap of stiff writing-paper placed over the hole of a spool. To make the sound, then, the toy was whirled rapidly through the air, when the stiff paper acted as a sounding-board to the vibrating hair.

At Surinam, Madame Merian tells us, the noise of the Cicada tibicen is still supposed to resemble the sound of a harp or lyre, and hence called the Lierman—the harper.[878] Another species, in Ceylon, which makes the forest re-echo with a long-sustained noise so curiously resembling that of a cutler’s wheel, has acquired the highly appropriate name of the Knife-grinder.[879]

It is said of our Cicada septemdecim, the so-called, but very improperly, “Seventeen-year Locust,” that, when they first leave the earth, when they are plump and full of juices, they have been made use of in the manufacture of soap.

The larva of a Chinese species of Cicada, the Flata limbata, which scarcely exceeds the domestic fly in size, forms a sort of grease, which adheres to the branches of trees and hardens into wax. In autumn the natives scrape this substance, which they call Pela, from off the trees, melt, purify, and form it into cakes. It is white and glossy in appearance, and, when mixed with oil, is used to make candles, and is said to be superior to the common wax for use. The physicians employ it in several diseases; and the Chinese, as we are informed by the Abbe Grosier, when they are about to speak in public, or when any occasion is likely to occur on which it may be necessary to have assurance and resolution, eat an ounce of it to prevent swoonings or palpitations of the heart.[880]

On the large cheese-like cakes of this wax, hanging in the grocers’ and tallow-chandlers’ shops at Hankow, are often seen the inscription written: “It mocks at the frost, and rivals the snow.” The price, in 1858, was forty dollars a picul, or about fifteen pence a pound.[881]

The Greeks, notwithstanding their veneration for the Cicada, made these insects an article of food, and accounted them delicious. Aristotle says, the larva, when it is grown

in the earth, and become a tettigometra (pupa), is the sweetest; when changed to the tettix, the males at first have the best flavor, but after impregnation the females are preferred, on account of their white ova.[882] Athenæus and Aristophanes also mention their being eaten; and Ælian is extremely angry with the men of his age that an animal sacred to the Muses should be strung, sold, and greedily devoured.[883] The Cicada septemdecim, Mr. Collinson in 1763 said, was eaten by the Indians of America, who plucked off the wings and boiled them.[884]

Osbeck tells us that the Cicada chinensis, along with the Buprestis maxima, and several species of Butterflies, is made an article of commerce by the Chinese, being sold in their shops.[885]