The horse, on the other hand, is rarely heard, and, though having a piercing whinny which passes through every semitone of the scale, it is scarcely ever varied.
The music of the insects has already been alluded to, and everyone will agree with Gilbert White that "not undelightful is the ceaseless hum, to him who musing walks at noon." The entomologist has laboured hard to show us that the insect has no voice, and that the "drowsy hum" is made by the wings; a fact which, being beyond all cavil, puts to the blush the old-world story of Plutarch, who tells us that when Terpander was playing upon the lyre, at the Olympic games, and had enraptured his audience to the highest pitch of enthusiasm a string of his instrument broke, and a cicada or grasshopper perched on the bridge supplied by its voice the loss of the string and saved the fame of the musician. To this day in Surinam the Dutch call them lyre-players. If there is any truth in the story, the grasshopper then had powers far in advance of his degenerated descendants; for now the grasshopper—like the cricket—has a chirp consisting of three notes in rhythm, always forming a triplet in the key of B.
Gardiner, on the authority of Dr. Primatt, states that, to produce the sound it makes, the house-fly must make 320 vibrations of its wings in a second; or nearly 20,000 if it continues on the wing a minute. The sound is invariably on the note F in the first space. The music of a duck's note is given in the annexed score.
In conclusion, an article on the music of Nature would not be complete without an allusion to the music of the winds and the storm. Admirers of Beethoven will recall numerous passages that would serve as illustrations. One particularly might be mentioned—the chorus in "Judah" (Haydn), "The Lord devoureth them all," which is admirably imitative of the reverberations of the cataract and the thundering of mighty waters. The sounds at sea, ominous of shipwreck, will also occur to the minds of some. At Land's End it is not uncommon for storms to be heralded by weird sounds; and in the northern seas sailors, always a superstitious race of people, used to be much alarmed by a singular musical effect, which is now well known to be caused by nothing more fearsome than a whale breathing.
