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 back 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 back 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
phenomenon 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--that 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." I do not know. But _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_."