And only there, please highly for their sake.”
No doubt there are associations, though these, belonging to the kitchen, appear to me to be of another and blither description, but the “sounds” themselves, in my opinion, are neither harsh nor inharmonious, as far as any unpleasantness to the ear is conveyed by the last word.
One interesting point about the song of crickets is that the number of notes uttered in any given space of time—per minute, say—varies according to the temperature, the two rising together. Professor Dolbeare was the first, as far as I know, to call attention to this fact, and he is thus confirmed by a lady: “One cool evening a cricket was caught and brought into a warm room. In a few minutes it began to chirp nearly twice as rapidly as the out-of-door crickets. Its rate very nearly conformed to the observed rate maintained on other evenings under the same temperature conditions (as now indoors). From this series of observations we found that the rate of chirping was, as Professor Dolbeare says, very closely dependent on the temperature.”[[27]] So the crickets are little thermometers—sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit to one hundred chirps per minute.
As we have seen, the Katydids give concerts, and we may therefore infer that they like their own music in a musically appreciative way; that they listen to each other as critical connoisseurs, whether they have other feelings or not, and that it is not a mere matter of the female alone admiring the sounds made by the male, just because he makes them. In all this, however, the admiration is confined—at least, as far as we know—to one species—that to which the musician belongs. Katydids appreciate the performances of Katydids. But there is one group of performers whose music gives satisfaction, not merely to individuals of other species than their own, but to such as are not even included in the same order with them, so that racial pride or family prejudice cannot be the reason of it. Towards these stars we will now turn our gaze.
All who have lived in the more southern parts of the world, including the southern countries of Europe, must have made the acquaintance of the cicadas, for in these regions they are large insects, conspicuous by their appearance when once seen, and by their song long before they are noticed. There is something very uncouth—one might almost say grotesquely humorous—yet at the same time pleasing and lovable about the broad flat heads and great goggle eyes of these insects, in the which it is easy to imagine some quaint sort of expression that seems to mean or suggest something for which the language supplies no word. Their wings, both long and broad, which, when folded, project far beyond the extremity of the abdomen, concealing everything save the great head and the wide shield or boss of the thorax, help also in giving them a most salient and characteristic appearance, and make them look more aerial than they really are. Their legs, whilst they retain their ordinary resting attitude, are entirely hidden, and so too are the organs of the mouth, which combine to make a sharp-pointed beak. Thus their appearance is typical of air and sunshine, and anything so gross as mere feeding or terrestrial locomotion seems foreign to their nature. The ancients, who loved and admired the cicadas extremely, thinking them the most fortunate of creatures, supposed that they lived entirely on dew.
“Oh Tettix, drunk with sipping dew,
What musician equals you?”
sings Anacreon, or someone who imitated him and wrote very gracefully, for Tettix was a common Greek name for the cicada. Really they live on the sap of the trees on which they sit, and there may even be two opinions about their music. To me it is pleasant enough—full of the joy of the sunshine, as it were, and its loudness and the continuous way in which it goes on excites one’s wonder. In regard to the way in which it is produced, Darwin says, at page 351 of his immortal work, The Descent of Man: “The sound, according to Laudois, who has recently studied the subject, is produced by the vibration of the lips of the spiracles, which are set in motion by a current of air emitted by the tracheæ. It is increased by a wonderfully complex resounding apparatus, consisting of two cavities covered with scales. Hence the sound may truly be called a voice. In the female the musical apparatus is present, but very much less developed than in the male, and is never used for producing sound.” As the Greeks, who must have had their observers, used to say—
“Happy the cicadas’ lives,
Since they all have voiceless wives.”