Probably it is owing to this rarity of our best insect singers, and partly, too, perhaps to the disagreeable effect on our ears of the loud cicadas heard during our southern travels, that an idea is produced in us of something exotic, or even fantastic, in a taste for insect music. We wonder at the ancient Greeks and the modern Japanese. But it should be borne in mind that the sounds had and have for them an expression they cannot have for us—the expression which comes of association.
If the insects named as our best are rare and local, or at all events not common, what shall we say of our cicada? Can we call him a singer at all? or if he be not silent, as some think, will he ever be more to us than a figure and descriptive passage in a book—a mere cicada of the mind? He is the most local, or has the most limited range, of all, being seldom found out of the New Forest district. He was discovered there about seventy years ago, and Curtis, who gave him the proud name of Cicada anglica, expressed the opinion that he had no song. And many others have thought so too, because they have been unable to hear him. Others, from Kirby and Spence to our time, have been of a contrary opinion. So the matter stands. A. H. Swinton, in his work on Insect Variety and Propagation, 1885, relates that he tried in vain to hear Cicada anglica before going to France and Italy to make a study of the cicada music; and he writes:
In northern England their woodland melody has not yet fallen on the ear of the entomologist, but it must not therefore be inferred that these musicians are wholly absent, for among the rich and bounteous southern fauna of Hampshire and Surrey we still retain one outlying waif of the cigales ... Cicada anglica, seemingly the montana of Scopoli, if not Hamatodes in proprid persona. The male, usually beaten in June from blossoming hawthorn in the New Forest, is provided with instruments of music, and the female, more terrestrial, is often observed wandering with a whit-ring sound among bracken wastes, where she is thought to deposit her ova.
It struck me some time ago that some of the disappointed entomologists may have heard the sound they were listening for without knowing it. In seeking for an object—some rare little flower, let us say, or a chipped flint, or a mushroom—we set out with an image of it in the mind, and unless the object sought for corresponds to its mental prototype, we in many cases fail to recognise it, and pass on. And it is the same with sounds. The listeners perhaps heard a sound so unlike their idea, or image, of a cicada's song, or so like the sound of some other quite different insect, that they paid no attention to it, and so missed what they sought for. At all events, I can say that unless we have some orthopterous insect, of a species unknown to me, which sings in trees, then our cicada does sing, and I have heard it. The sound which I heard, and which was new to me, came from the upper foliage of a large thorn-tree in the New Forest, but unfortunately it ceased on my approach, and I failed to find the singer. The entomologist may say that the question remains as it was, but my experience may encourage him to try again. Had I not been expecting to hear an insect singing high up in the trees, I should have said at once that this was a grasshopper's music, though unlike that of any of the species I am accustomed to hear. It was a sustained sound, like that of the great green grasshopper, but not of that excessively bright, subtle, penetrative quality: it was a lower sound, not shrill, and distinctly slower—in other words, the beats or drops of sound which compose the grasshopper's song, and run in a stream, were more distinct and separate, giving it a trilling rather than a reeling character. Had we, in England, possessed a stridulating mantis, which is capable of a slower, softer sound than any grasshopper, I should have concluded that I was listening to one; but there was not, in this New Forest music, the slightest resemblance to the cicada sounds I had heard in former years. The cicadas may be a "merry people," and they certainly had the prettiest things said of them by the poets of Greece, but I do not like their brain-piercing, everlasting whirr; this sound of the English cicada, assuming that I heard that insect, was distinctly pleasing.
Locusta viridissima
But more than cicada, or field-cricket, or any other insect musician in the land, is our great green grasshopper, or leaf-cricket, Locusta viridissima. I have been accustomed to hear him in July and August, in hedges, gardens, and potato patches at different points along the south coast and at some inland spots, always in the evening. It is easy, even after dark, to find him by following up the sound, when he may be seen moving excitedly about on the topmost sprays or leaves, pausing at intervals to stridulate, and occasionally taking short leaps from spray to spray. He belongs to a family widely distributed on the earth, and in La Plata I was familiar with two species which in form and colour—a uniform vivid green—were just like our viridissima, but differed in size, one being smaller and the other twice as large. The smaller species sang by day, all day long, among water-plants growing in the water; the large species stridulated only by night, chiefly in the maize fields, and was almost as loud and harsh as the cicadas of the same region. I distinctly remember the sounds emitted by these two species, and by several other grasshoppers and leaf-crickets, but none of their sounds came very near in character to that of viridissima. This is a curious, and to my sense a very beautiful sound; and when a writer describes it as "harsh," which we not unfrequently find, I must conclude either that one of us hears wrongly, or not as the world hears, or that, owing to poverty, he is unable to give a fit expression. It is a sustained sound, a current of brightest, finest, bell-like strokes or beats, lasting from three or four to ten or fifteen seconds, to be renewed again and again after short intervals; but when the musician is greatly excited, the pauses last only for a moment—about half a second, and the strain may go on for ten minutes or longer before a break of any length. But the quality is the chief thing; and here we find individual differences, and that some have a lower, weaker note, in which may be detected a buzz, or sibilation, as in the field-grasshopper; but, as a rule, it is of a shrillness and musicalness which is without parallel. The squealings of bats, shrews, and young mice are excessively sharp, and are aptly described as "needles of sound," but they are not musical. The only bird I know which has a note comparable to the viridissima is the lesser whitethroat—the excessively sharp, bright sound emitted both as an anger-note and in that low and better song described in a former chapter. It is this musical sharpness which pleases in the insect, and makes it so unlike all other sounds in a world so full of sound. Its incisiveness produces a curious effect: sitting still and listening for some time at a spot where several insects are stridulating, certain nerves throb with the sound until it seems that it is in the brain, and is like that disagreeable condition called "ringing in the ears" made pleasant. Almost too fine and sharp to be described as metallic, perhaps it comes nearer to the familiar sound described by Henley:
Of ice and glass the tinkle,
Pellucid, crystal-shrill.
Crystal beads dropped in a stream down a crystal stair would produce a sound somewhat like the insect's song, but duller. We may, indeed, say that this grasshopper's sounding instrument is glass; it is a shining talc-like disc, which may be seen with the unaided sight by raising the elytra.
Some time ago, in glancing through some copies of Newman's monthly Entomologist, 1836, I came upon an account of a numerous colony of the great green grasshopper, which the writer found by chance at a spot on the Cornish coast. The effect produced by the stridulating of a large number of these insects was very curious. I envied the old insect-hunter his experience. A colony of viridissima—what a happiness it would be to discover such a thing! And now, late in the summer of 1902, I have found one, and though a very thinly populated one compared to his, it has given me a long-coveted opportunity of watching and listening to the little green people to my heart's content.