Any one wishing to see the Cricket lay her eggs can do so without making great preparations: all that he wants is a little patience, which, according to Buffon, is genius, but which I, more modestly, will describe as the observer’s chief virtue. In April, or at latest in May, we establish isolated couples of the insect in flower-pots containing a layer of heaped-up earth. Their provisions consist of a lettuce-leaf renewed from time to time. A square of glass covers the retreat and prevents escape.
Some extremely interesting facts can be obtained with this simple installation, supplemented, if need be, with a wire-gauze cover, [[314]]the best of all cages. We shall return to this matter. For the moment, let us watch the laying and make sure that the propitious hour does not evade our vigilance.
It is in the first week in June that my assiduous visits begin to show satisfactory results. I surprise the mother standing motionless, with her ovipositor planted perpendicularly in the soil. For a long time she remains stationed at the same point, heedless of her indiscreet caller. At last she withdraws her dibble, removes, more or less perfunctorily, the traces of the boring-hole, takes a moment’s rest, walks away and starts again somewhere else, now here, now there, all over the area at her disposal. Her behaviour, though her movements are slower, is a repetition of what the Decticus has shown us. Her egg-laying appears to me to be ended within the twenty-four hours. For greater certainty, I wait a couple of days longer.
I then dig up the earth in the pot. The straw-coloured eggs are cylinders rounded at both ends and measuring about one-ninth of an inch in length. They are placed singly in the soil, arranged vertically and grouped in more or less numerous patches, which correspond [[315]]with the successive layings. I find them all over the pot, at a depth of three-quarters of an inch. There are difficulties in examining a mass of earth through a magnifying-glass; but, allowing for these difficulties, I estimate the eggs laid by one mother at five or six hundred. So large a family is sure to undergo a drastic purging before long.
The Cricket’s egg is a little marvel of mechanism. After hatching, it appears as an opaque white sheath, with a round and very regular aperture at the top; to the edge of this a cap adheres, forming a lid. Instead of bursting anyhow under the thrusts or cuts of the new-born larva, it opens of its own accord along a specially prepared line of least resistance.
It became important to observe the curious hatching. About a fortnight after the egg is laid, two large, round, rusty-black eye-dots darken the front end. A little way above these two dots, right at the apex of the cylinder, you see the outline of a thin circular swelling. This is the line of rupture which is preparing. Soon the translucency of the egg enables the observer to perceive the delicate segmentation of the tiny creature [[316]]within. Now is the time to redouble our vigilance and multiply our visits, especially in the morning.
Fortune, which loves the persevering, rewards me for my assiduity. All round this swelling where, by a process of infinite delicacy, the line of least resistance has been prepared, the end of the egg, pushed back by the inmate’s forehead, becomes detached, rises and falls to one side like the top of a miniature scent-bottle. The Cricket pops out like a Jack-in-the-box.
When he is gone, the shell remains distended, smooth, intact, pure white, with the cap or lid hanging from the opening. A bird’s egg breaks clumsily under the blows of a wart that grows for the purpose at the end of the chick’s beak; the Cricket’s egg, endowed with a superior mechanism, opens like an ivory case. The thrust of the inmate’s head is enough to work the hinge.
The hatching of the eggs is hastened by the glorious weather; and the observer’s patience is not much tried, the rapidity rivalling that of the Dung-beetles. The summer solstice has not yet arrived when the ten couples interned under glass for the benefit of my studies are surrounded by their [[317]]numerous progeny. The egg-stage, therefore, lasts just about ten days.
I said above that, when the lid of the ivory case is lifted, a young Cricket pops out. This is not quite accurate. What appears at the opening is the swaddled grub, as yet unrecognizable in a tight-fitting sheath. I expected to see this wrapper, this first set of baby-clothes, for the same reasons that made me anticipate it in the case of the Decticus: