Great and greatest among insects--Our feeling for insect
music--Crickets and grasshoppers--_Cicada anglica_--_Locusta
viridissima_--Character of its music--Colony of green
grasshoppers--Harewood Forest--Purple emperor--Grasshoppers' musical
contests--The naturalist mocked--Female
_viridissima_--Over-elaboration in the male--Habits of female--Wooing
of the male by the female.
I had thought to include all or most of the greatest of the insects
known in these parts in the last chapter, but the hornet, and the
vision it called up of that last revel in the late-blossoming ivy on
the eve of winter and cold death, seemed to bring that part of the
book to an end. The hornet was the greatest in the sense that a
strong man and conqueror is the greatest among ourselves, as the lion
or wolf among mammals, and that feathered thunderbolt and scourge,
the peregrine falcon, among birds. But there are great and greatest
in other senses; and just as there are singers, big and little, as
well as warriors among the "insect tribes of human kind," so there
are among these smaller men of the mandibulate division of the class
Insecta. And their singers, when not too loud and persistent, as
they are apt to be in warmer lands than ours, are among the most
agreeable of the inhabitants of the earth. They are less to us than
to the people of the southern {134} countries of Europe--infinitely
less than they were to some of the civilised nations of antiquity,
and than they are to the Japanese of to-day. This is, I suppose, on
account of their rarity with us, for our best singers are certainly
somewhat rare or else exceedingly local. The field-cricket, which
must be passed over in this chapter to be described later on, is an
instance in point. The universal house-cricket is known to, and in
some degree loved by, all or most persons; it is the cricket on the
hearth, that warm, bright, social spot when the world outside is dark
and cheerless; the lively, companionable sound endears itself to the
child, and later in life is dear because of its associations. The
field-grasshopper, too, is familiar to everyone in the summer
pastures; but the best of our insect musicians, the great green
grasshopper, appears to be almost unknown to the people. Here, for
instance, where I am writing, there is one on the table which
stridulates each afternoon, and in the evening when the lamp is
lighted. The sustained bright shrilling penetrates to all parts of
the house, and in the tap-room of the inn, two rooms away, the
villagers, coming in for their evening beer and conversation, are
startled at the unfamiliar, sharp, silvery sound, and ask if it is a
bird.
[Sidenote: Insect music]
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 {135} 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.
{136}
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 {137} 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.
[Sidenote: 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 {138} 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
{139} 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, {140} it has given me a long-coveted opportunity
of watching and listening to the little green people to my heart's
content.
[Sidenote: Good-for-nothing grass]
The happy spot was in Harewood Forest, a dense oak-wood covering an
area of about two thousand acres, a few miles from Andover. I had
haunted it for some days, finding little wild life to interest me
except the jays, which seemed to be the principal inhabitants. In
the middle of this forest or wood, among the oak trees there stands a
tall handsome granite cross about thirty feet high, placed to mark
the exact spot, known as "Deadman's Plack," where over nine centuries
ago King Edgar, with his own hand, slew his friend and favourite,
Earl Athelwold. The account which history gives of this pious
monarch, called the Peaceable, despite his volcanic disposition where
women were concerned, especially his affair with Elfrida, who was
also pious and volcanic as well as beautiful, reads in these dull,
proper times like a tale from another hotter, fiercer world. It is
not strange that many persons find their way through the thick forest
by the narrow track to this place or "Plack"; and there too I went on
several days, and sat by the hour and meditated. It had struck me as
a suitable spot to watch for the purple emperor; but I saw him not,
and once only I caught sight of his bride to be--a big black-looking
butterfly which rose from the top of an oak, took a short flight, and
returned to settle once more on the highest leaves in the same place.
This vain hunt for the purple king of the butterflies--to see him,
not to "take"--led {141} to the discovery of the green minstrels.
Near the cross, or "monument," as it is called, there is an open
place occupying a part of the top and a slope of a down, as pretty a
bit of wild heath as may be found in the county. Stony and barren in
places, it is in other parts clothed in ling, purple with bloom at
this season, with a few pretty little birches and clumps of tangled
thorn and bramble scattered about. But the feature which gives a
peculiar charm to the spot is the false brome grass which flourishes
on the slope, growing in large patches, and on the borders of these
mixing its vivid light-green tussocks with the purple-flowered heath.
It is the species called (in books) heath false brome grass, but as
lips of man refuse to pronounce these four ponderous monosyllables,
the invention of some dreary botanist, that follow and jolt against
each other, I will venture to rename it good-for-nothing grass. For
it is useless to the farmer, since no domestic herbivore will touch
it; its sole justification is its exceeding beauty. It grows as high
as a man's knees, or higher, and even in the driest, hottest season
keeps its wonderfully vivid fresh green, as near a brilliant colour
as any green leaf can be; and the stalks and graceful spikes after
the flowering time are pale yellow-brown, and have a golden lustre in
the bright August and September sunlight. Could our poetical
_viridissima_ have a more suitable home! And here, coming out from
the thick oaks and sauntering about the heath I caught the sound of
his delicate shrilling, and to my delight found myself in the midst
of a colony. They {142} were not abundant, and one could not
experience the sensation produced by many stridulating at a time:
they were thinly scattered over two or three acres of ground, but at
some points I could hear several of them shrilling together at
different distances, and it was not difficult to keep two or three in
sight at one time.
Hitherto I had known this insect as an evening musician, beginning as
a rule after sunset and continuing till about eleven o'clock. Here
he made his music only during the daylight hours, from about ten or
eleven in the morning until five or six o'clock in the afternoon,
becoming silent at noon when it was hot. But it was late in the
season when I found him, on 26th August, and after much rain the
weather had become exceptionally cool for the time of year.
[Illustration: RIVAL GREAT GREEN GRASSHOPPERS]
When stridulating it appeared to be the ambition of every male
grasshopper to get up as high as he could climb on the stiff blades
and thin stalks of the grass; and there, very conspicuous in his
uniform green colour which in a strong sunlight looked like the green
of verdigris, his translucent overwings glistening like a
dragon-fly's wings, he would shrill and make the grass to which he
was clinging tremble to his rapidly vibrating body. Then he would
listen to the shrill response of some other singer not far off, and
then sing and listen again, and yet again; then all at once in a
determined manner he would set out to find his rival, travelling high
up through the grass, climbing stems and blades until they bent
enough for him to grasp others and push on, {144} reminding one of a
squirrel progressing through the thin highest branches of a hazel
copse. After covering the distance in this manner, with a few short
pauses by the way to shrill back an answering challenge, he would
find a suitable place near to the other, still in his place high up
in the grass; and then the two, a foot or so, sometimes three or four
inches, apart, would begin a regular duel in sound at short range.
Each takes his turn, and when one sings the other raises one of his
forelegs to listen; one may say that in lifting a leg he "cocks an
ear." The attitude of the insects is admirably given in the
accompanying drawing from life. This contest usually ends in a real
fight: one advances, and when at a distance of five or six inches
makes a leap at his adversary, and the other, prepared for what is
coming and in position, leaps too at the same time, so that they meet
midway, and strike each other with their long spiny hind legs. It is
done so quickly that the movements cannot be followed by the eye, but
that they do hit hard is plain, as in many cases one is knocked down
or flung to some distance away. Thus ends the round; the beaten one
rushes off as quickly as he can, as if hurt, but soon pulls up, and
lowering his head, begins defiantly stridulating as before. The
other follows him up, shrills at and attacks him again; and you may
see a dozen or twenty such encounters between the same two in the
course of half an hour. Occasionally when the blow is struck they
grasp each other and fall together; and it is hardly to be doubted
that they not only kick, like French wrestlers and {145} bald-headed
coots, but also make wicked use of their powerful black teeth. Some
of the fighters I examined had lost a portion of one of the
forelegs--one had lost portions of two--and these had evidently been
bitten off. Perhaps they inflict even worse injuries. Hearing two
shrilling against each other at a spot where there was a large clump
of heath between them, I dropped down close by to listen and watch,
when I discovered a third grasshopper sitting mid-way between the
others in the centre of the heath-bush. This one appeared more
excited than the others, keeping his wings violently agitated almost
without a pause, and yet not the faintest sound proceeded from him.
It proved on examination that one of his stiff overwings had been
bitten or torn off at the base, so that he had but half of his
sounding apparatus left, and no music could his most passionate
efforts ever draw from it, and, silent, he was no more in the world
of green grasshoppers than a bird with a broken wing in the world of
birds.
[Sidenote: Singing-contests]
For it cannot be doubted that his own music is the greatest, the one
all-absorbing motive and passion of his little soul. This may seem
to be saying too much--to attribute something of human feelings to a
creature so immeasurably far removed from us. Fantastic in shape,
even among beings invertebrate and unhuman, one that indeed sees with
opal eyes set in his green goat-like mask, but who hears with his
forelegs, breathes through spiracles set in his sides, whipping the
air for other sense-impressions and unimaginable sorts of knowledge
with his excessively {146} long limber horns, or antennæ, just as a
dry-fly fisher whips the crystal stream for speckled trout; and,
finally, who wears his musical apparatus (his vocal organs) like an
electric shield or plaster on the small of his back. Nevertheless it
is impossible to watch their actions without regarding them as
creatures of like passions with ourselves. The resemblance is most
striking when we think not of what we, hard Saxons, are in this cold
north, but of the more fiery, music-loving races in warmer countries.
I remember in my early years, before the advent of "Progress" in
those outlying realms, that the ancient singing contests still
flourished among the gauchos of La Plata. They were all lovers of
their own peculiar kind of music, singing endless _decimas_ and
_coplas_ in high-pitched nasal tones to the strum-strumming of a
guitar; and when any singer of a livelier mind than his fellows had
the faculty of improvising, his fame went forth, and the others of
his quality were filled with emulation, and journeyed long distances
over the lonely plains to meet and sing against him. How curiously
is this like our island grasshoppers, who have come to us unchanged
from the past, and are neither Saxons nor Celts, but true, original,
ancient Britons--the little grass-green people with passionate souls!
You can almost hear him say--this little green minstrel you have been
watching when his shrill note has brought back as shrill an
answer--as he resolutely sets out over the tall, bending grasses in
the direction of the sound, "I'll teach him to sing!"
{147}
[Sidenote: A human parallel]
So interested was I in watching them, so delighted to be in this
society, whose members, for all their shape, no longer moved about
in, to me, unimaginable worlds, that I went day after day and spent
long hours with them. I could best watch their battles by getting
down on my knees in the good-for-nothing ("heath false brome") grass,
so as to bring my eyes within two or three feet of them. My
attitude, kneeling with bowed head by the half-hour at a stretch, one
day attracted the attention of some persons who had come in a
carriage to picnic under the trees at the foot of the slope, four or
five hundred yards away. There were from time to time little
explosions of laughter, and at last a young lady of twelve or
fourteen cried, or piped out, in a clear, far-reaching voice, "Holy
man!" She was an impudent monkey.
So far not a word has been said of the female, simply because, as it
seemed to me, there was, so far, nothing to say. In most insects the
odour excites and draws the males, often from long distances, as we
see in the moths; they fly to, and find, and see her, and woo, and
chase, and fight with each other for possession of her; and when
there are beautiful or fantastic movements, sometimes accompanied
with sounds, corresponding to the antics of birds--I have observed
them in species of Asilidæ and other insects--they are directly
caused by the presence of the female. But with _viridissima_ it
appears not to be so, since they do not seek the female, nor will
they notice her when she comes in {148} their way, but they are
wholly absorbed in their own music, and in trying to outsing the
others, or, failing in this, to kick and bite them into silence.
Now, seeing this strange condition of things among these
insects--seeing it day after day for weeks--the conclusion forced
itself upon my mind that we have here one of those strange cases
among the lower creatures which are not uncommon in human life--the
case of a faculty, a means to an end, being developed and refined to
an excessive degree, and the reflex effect of this too great
refinement on the species, or race. Comparing it then to certain
human matters--to Art, let us say--we see that that which was but a
means has become an end, and is pursued for its own sake.
Such a conclusion may seem absurd, and perhaps it is, since we cannot
know what "nimble emanations" and vibrations, which touch not our
coarser natures, there may be to link these diverse and seemingly
ill-fitting actions into one perfect chain. It may be said, for
instance, that in this species the incessant stridulating of the male
has an action similar to that of the sun's light and heat on plant
life, causing the flower to blow and its sexual organs to ripen. But
we see, too, that Nature does often overshoot her mark. We have seen
it, I think, in the over-refinement of the passion and faculty of
fear in certain species, in reference to cases of fascination, and we
see it in the over-protected and the over-specialised; but we are so
imbued with the idea that the right mean has always been hit upon and
{149} adhered to, that it is only in view of the most flagrant cases
to the contrary that we are ever startled out of that delusion. The
miserable case, for example, of the _Polyergus rufescens_, the
slave-making ant, who, from being too much waited upon, has so
entirely lost the power of waiting upon himself that he will perish
of hunger amidst plenty if his slaves be not there to pick up and put
the food into his mouth. These extreme cases are not the only ones;
for every one of such a character there are hundreds of cases.
"Degeneration," as Ray Lankester has aptly said, "goes hand in hand
with elaboration"; and I would add that in numberless cases
over-elaboration is the cause of degeneration.
[Sidenote: The female viridissima]
The female is the grander insect, being nearly a third larger than
the male, of a fuller figure, and adorned with a long,
broadsword-shaped ovipositor, which projects beyond her wings like a
tail. She has rather a grand air too, and is both silent and
inactive. Hers is a life of listening and waiting; and the waiting
is long--days and weeks go by, and the males stridulate, and fight,
and pay no attention to her. But how patient she can be may be seen
in the case of one which I took from her heath and placed on a
well-berried branch of wild guelder on my table. There she was
contented to rest, usually on one of the topmost clusters, for many
days, almost always with the window open at the side of her branch,
so that she could easily have made her escape. The wind blew in upon
her, and outside the world was green and lit with sunshine. One
could {150} almost fancy that she was conscious of her fine
appearance in her pale vivid green colour, touched in certain lights
with glaucous blue, on her throne of clustered carbuncles. At
intervals of an hour or two she would move about a little, and find
some other perch; only the waving of her long, fine antennæ appeared
to show that she was alive to much that was going on about her--in
her world. The one thing that excited her was the stridulating of
one of the males confined in a glass vessel on the same table. She
would then travel over her branch to get as near as possible to the
musician, and would remain motionless, even to the nervous antennæ,
and apparently absorbed in the sound for as long as it lasted. At
first she ate a few of the crimson berries on her branch, and also
took a little parsley and shepherd's purse, but later on she declined
all green stuff, and fed on jam, honey, cooked sultanas, and
bread-and-butter pudding, which she liked best. Water and
ginger-beer for drink. This most placid and dignified lady--we had
got into calling her "Lady Greensleeves," and "Queen," and sometimes
"The Cow"--was restored, on 12th September, in good health, after
sixteen days, to her native heath, and disappeared from sight in the
long grass, quietly making her way to some spot where she could
settle down comfortably to listen to the music.
[Sidenote: Habits of female]
All the females I found and watched behaved as my captive had done.
They were no more active, and preferred to be at a good height above
the {151} ground--eighteen inches or two feet--when quietly
listening. One day I watched one perched on the topmost spray of a
heath-bush in her listening attitude: clouds came over the sun, and
the wind grew colder and stronger, and the singers ceased singing.
And at last, finding that the silence continued, and doubtless
feeling uncomfortable on that spray where the wind blew on and swayed
her about, she slowly climbed down and settled herself in a
horizontal position on the sheltered side of the plant; and when the
sun broke out and shone on her she tipped over on one side, stretched
her hind legs out, and rested motionless in that position, exactly
like a fowl lying in her dusting-place luxuriating in the heat.
But at last, despite that air of repose which is her chief
characteristic, she is so wrought upon by that perpetual, shrill,
irresistible music that she can no longer endure to sit still, but is
drawn to it. She goes to her charmers, one may say, to remind them
by her presence that the minstrelsy in which they are so absorbed is
not itself an end but a means. Brisk or lively she cannot be, but it
is plain that when she follows up or settles herself down near her
forgetful knights, she is greatly excited, and waiting to be taken in
marriage. That she distinguishes one singer above others, or
exercises "selection" in the Darwinian sense, seems unlikely: it
strikes one, on the contrary, that having so long suffered neglect
she is only too willing to be claimed by any one of them. And this
is just what they decline to {152} do--for some time, at any rate.
Again and again I have observed when the female had followed and
placed herself close to a couple of these rival musicians, that they
took not the least notice of her; and that when, in the course of the
alarums and excursions, one of them found himself close to her, the
sight of her appeared to disconcert him, and he made all haste to get
away from her. It looked to human eyes as if her large portly figure
had not corresponded to his ideal, and had even moved him to
repugnance. But the Ann of Cleves in a green gown is an exceedingly
patient person, and very persistent, and though often denied, she
will not be denied, or take No for an answer. But it is altogether a
curious business, for not only is the wooing process reversed, as
many think it is in the cuckoo, but it lasts an unconscionable time
in a creature whose life, in the perfect stage, is limited to a
season. But the female _viridissima_ has not the power and swiftness
of that feathered lady who boldly pursues her singer (in love with
nothing but his own voice), and compels him to take her.
{153}