Of my experiments in this matter, I will mention only one, the most memorable. I borrow the municipal artillery, that is to say, the mortars which are made to thunder forth on the feast of the patron-saint. The gunner is delighted to load them for the benefit of the Cicadæ and to come and fire them off at my place. There are two of them, crammed as though for the most solemn rejoicings. No politician making the circuit of his constituency in search of re-election was ever honoured with so much powder. We are careful to leave the windows open, to save the panes from breaking. The two thundering engines are set at the foot of the plane-trees in front of my door. No precautions are taken to mask them: the Cicadæ singing in the branches overhead cannot see what is happening below.
We are an audience of six. We wait for a moment of comparative quiet. The number [[79]]of singers is checked by each of us, as are the depth and rhythm of the song. We are now ready, with ears pricked up to hear what will happen in the aerial orchestra. The mortar is let off, with a noise like a genuine thunder-clap.
There is no excitement whatever up above. The number of executants is the same, the rhythm is the same, the volume of sound the same. The six witnesses are unanimous: the mighty explosion has in no way affected the song of the Cicadæ. And the second mortar gives an exactly similar result.
What conclusion are we to draw from this persistence of the orchestra, which is not at all surprised or put out by the firing of a gun? Am I to infer from it that the Cicada is deaf? I will certainly not venture so far as that; but, if any one else, more daring than I, were to make the assertion, I should really not know what arguments to employ in contradicting him. I should be obliged at least to concede that the Cicada is extremely hard of hearing and that we may apply to him the familiar saying, to bawl like a deaf man.
When the Blue-winged Locust takes his luxurious fill of sunshine on a gravelly path [[80]]and with his great hind-shanks rubs the rough edge of his wing-cases; when the Green Tree-frog, suffering from as chronic a cold as the Cacan, swells his throat among the leaves and distends it into a resounding bladder at the approach of a storm, are they both calling to their absent mates? By no means. The bow-strokes of the first produce hardly a perceptible stridulation; the throaty exuberance of the second is no more effective: the object of their desire does not come.
Does the insect need these sonorous outbursts, these loquacious avowals, to declare its flame? Consult the vast majority, whom the meeting of the two sexes leaves silent. I see in the Grasshopper’s fiddle, the Tree-frog’s bagpipes and the cymbals of the Cacan but so many methods of expressing the joy of living, the universal joy which every animal species celebrates after its kind.
If any one were to tell me that the Cicadæ strum on their noisy instruments without giving a thought to the sound produced and for the sheer pleasure of feeling themselves alive, just as we rub our hands in a moment of satisfaction, I should not be greatly [[81]]shocked. That there may be also a secondary object in their concert, an object in which the dumb sex is interested, is quite possible, quite natural, though this has not yet been proved. [[82]]
[1] Guillaume Antoine Olivier (1756–1814), a distinguished French entomologist, author of an Histoire naturelle des coléoptères, in six volumes (1789–1808), and part author of the nine volumes devoted to a Dictionnaire de l’histoire naturelle des insectes in the Encyclopédie méthodique (1789–1819).—Translator’s Note. [↑]