The Animal Kingdom may be divided into creatures which one can feed
and creatures which one cannot feed. Animals which one cannot feed are
nearly always unsatisfactory; and the grasshopper is no exception.
Anyone who has tried feeding a grasshopper will agree with me.
Yet he is one of the most interesting of British creatures. The
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ is as terse and simple as ever about him.
“Grasshoppers,” it says, “are specially remarkable for their saltatory
powers, due to the great development of the hind legs; and also for
their stridulation, which is not always an attribute of the male only.”
To translate, grasshoppers have a habit of hopping (“saltatory powers”)
and chirping (“stridulation”).
It is commonly supposed that the grasshopper stridulates by rubbing
his back legs together; but this is not the case. For one thing I
have tried it myself and failed to make any kind of noise; and for
another, after exhaustive observations, I have established the fact
that, though he does move his back legs every time he stridulates, _his
back legs do not touch each other_. Now it is a law of friction that
you cannot have friction between two back legs if the back legs are
not touching; in other words, the grasshopper does not rub his legs
together to produce stridulation, or, to put it quite shortly, he does
not rub his back legs together _at all_. I hope I have made this point
quite clear. If not, a more detailed treatment will be found in the
Paper which I read to the Royal Society in 1912.
Nevertheless I have always felt that there was something fishy about
the grasshopper’s back legs. I mean, why _should_ he wave his legs
about when he is stridulating? My own theory is that it is purely due
to the nervous excitement produced by the act of singing. The same
phenomena can be observed in many singers and public speakers. I do
not think myself that we need seek for a more elaborate hypothesis.
The _Encyclopædia Britannica_, of course, says that “the stridulation
or song in the _Acridiidæ_ is produced by friction of the hind legs
against portions of the wings or wing-covers,” but that is just the
sort of statement which the scientific man thinks he can pass off on
the public with impunity. Considering that stridulation takes place
about every ten seconds, I calculate that the grasshopper must require
a new set of wings every ten days. It would be more in keeping with the
traditions of our public life if the scientific man simply confessed
that he was baffled by this problem of the grasshopper’s back legs.
Yet, as I have said, if a public speaker may fidget with his back legs
while he is stridulating, why not a public grasshopper? The more I see
of science the more it strikes me as one large mystification.
But I ought to have mentioned that “the _Acridiidæ_ have the auditory
organs on the first abdominal segment,” while “the _Locustidæ_ have the
auditory organ on the _tibia_ of the first leg.” In other words, one
kind of grasshopper hears with its stomach and the other kind listens
with its leg. When a scientific man has committed himself to that kind
of statement he would hardly have qualms about a little invention like
the back-legs legend.
With this scientific preliminary we now come to the really intriguing
part of our subject, and that is the place of the grasshopper in
modern politics. And the first question is, Why did Mr. Lloyd George
call Lord Northcliffe a grasshopper? I think it was in a speech about
Russia that Mr. Lloyd George said, in terms, that Lord Northcliffe
was a grasshopper. And he didn’t leave it at that. He said that Lord
Northcliffe was not only a grasshopper but a something something
grasshopper, grasshopping here and grasshopping there--you know the
sort of thing. There was nothing much in the accusation, of course,
and Lord Northcliffe made no reply at the time; in fact, so far as I
know, he has never publicly stated that he is _not_ a grasshopper; for
all we know it may be true. But I know a man whose wife’s sister was
in service at a place where there was a kitchen-maid whose young man
was once a gardener at Lord Northcliffe’s, and this man told me--the
first man, I mean--that Lord Northcliffe took it to heart terribly. No
grasshoppers were allowed in the garden from that day forth; no green
that was at all like grasshopper-green was tolerated in the house,
and the gardener used to come upon his Lordship muttering in the West
Walk: “A grasshopper! He called me a grasshopper--ME--A GRASSHOPPER!”
The gardener said that his Lordship used to finish up with, “_I_’ll
teach him”; but that is hardly the kind of thing a lord would say, and
I don’t believe it. In fact, I don’t believe any of it. It is a stupid
story.
But this crisis we keep having with France owing to Mr. Lloyd George’s
infamous conduct does make the story interesting. The suggestion is,
you see, that Lord Northcliffe lay low for a long time, till everybody
had forgotten about the grasshopper and Mr. Lloyd George thought that
Lord Northcliffe had forgotten about the grasshopper, and then, when
Mr. Lloyd George was in a hole, Lord Northcliffe said, “_Now_ we’ll
see if I am a grasshopper or not,” and started stridulating at high
speed about Mr. Lloyd George. A crude suggestion. But if it were true
it would mean that the grasshopper had become a figure of national and
international importance. It is wonderful to think that we might stop
being friends with France just because of a grasshopper; and, if Lord
Northcliffe arranged for a new Government to come in, it might very
well be called “The Grasshopper Government.” That would look fine in
the margins of the history books.
Yes, it is all very “dramatic.” It is exciting to think of an English
lord nursing a grievance about a grasshopper for months and months,
seeing grasshoppers in every corner, dreaming about grasshoppers....
But we must not waste time over the fantastic tale. We have not yet
solved our principal problem. Why did Mr. Lloyd George call him a
grasshopper--a modest, friendly little grasshopper? Did he mean to
suggest that Lord Northcliffe hears with his stomach or stridulates
with his back legs?
Why not an earwig, or a black-beetle, or a wood-louse, or a centipede?
There are lots of insects more offensive than the grasshopper, and
personally I would much rather be called a grasshopper than an earwig,
which gets into people’s sponges and frightens them to death.
Perhaps he had been reading that nice passage in the Prophet Nahum:
“Thy captains are as the great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges
in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their
place is not known where they are,” or the one in Ecclesiastes: “And
the grasshopper shall be a burden.” I do not know. On the other hand,
the _Encyclopædia_ has a suggestive sentence: “All grasshoppers are
vegetable feeders and have an incomplete metamorphosis, so that _their
destructive powers are continuous from the moment of emergence from the
egg until death_.”