The species generally met with in gardens, corn-fields, and orchards is the Gryllotalpa vulgaris of Latreille, identical with the Gryllus gryllotalpa of Linnæus. It has a brown head, garnished with rusty-coloured mandibles; the thorax is of a brownish-gray, velvety, tinged with red in the fore parts; the elytra, or wing-sheaths, which are much shorter than the abdomen, are gray, and marked by black and conspicuously prominent nerves; the wings, folded back like a fan, are about one-fourth longer than the abdomen.
The mole-cricket,—mark me!—is no more of a root-eater than the mole; it is carnivorous, like the Staphylinus. As an experiment in confirmation of this statement, we shut up one of these curious Orthopteras in a large chest filled with mould. Concealed in the galleries which it speedily constructed for its use, it fed upon larvæ, and never touched the cereals which we had sown in the earth. Here was a proof that we had to plead the cause of another of man's victims.
The mole-cricket ejects, when pursued or tormented, a blackish liquid, whose etherealised odour reminds one of the peculiar smell of certain rotten apples. The female, larger than the male, lays her eggs, which are, comparatively speaking, of a tolerable size (Fig. 62, b), at some depth underground. The young, when hatched, resemble their parents, except that they are white, and possess merely the rudiments of wings.
If the mole-cricket, in its subterranean progress, encounters any roots, it cuts them with its mandibles, not to feed upon them, but to get rid of an obstacle; hence the mischief of which the farmer accuses it, though this slight amount of injury is altogether outweighed by its services in destroying a swarm of insects.
Perhaps, therefore, we must not blame the farmer for the hostility with which he pursues it, especially if we are to accept as a true picture of its doings the sketch recently drawn by a popular writer:—
"It is easy to understand that an insect which undermines land in this way must cause great damage to cultivation (!). Whether the crops serve it for food or not, they are not the less destroyed by its underground burrowings. Lands infested by the mole-cricket are recognisable by the colour of the vegetation, which is yellow and withered; and the rubbish which these miners heap up at the side of the openings leading to their galleries, resembling mole-hills in miniature, betrays their presence to the farmer."
If, I say, this be a true picture, we cannot wonder at the means employed by the farmer to clear his fields of such dangerous tenants. The plan generally adopted is to dig, at intervals, a number of little trenches, which are filled up with cow-dung, well trodden down. The supposed root-eaters assemble in these warm nests; and every fourth or fifth day, a labourer, armed with a pitchfork, scoops up the manure at a single stroke, and scatters it over the ground, while another crushes the unfortunate Gryllotalpæ as fast as they make their appearance.
The Earwig.
Next to the domestic fly, the earwig is, perhaps, one of our commonest, and, let us add, one of our most troublesome, insects. Whence comes its popular appellation? From a mere fable. To amuse the silly—alas! how great their number!—marvelling, without doubt, at the spectacle of an insect's tail armed with strong pincers, some jester wished to transform it into a terrible animal; and therefore he pretended that it introduced itself into the human ear, and from thence penetrated to the brain, with the view of driving out its proprietor,—i.e., the mind or spirit which animates it. Only, the originator of this absurd bugbear forgot one little fact: there is no opening by which the ear can communicate with the brain! As for the pincers, they are not so formidable as they appear. This character, however, has been considered a sufficient foundation by the naturalists, even by Linnæus himself, for the insect's scientific name, Forficula auricularia, which is almost literally translated by the French oreille-pince,—our English earwig or ear-piercer. (Fig. 64.)
