THE WHITE-FACED DECTICUS: THE INSTRUMENT OF SOUND
Art has three fields which it may cultivate in the realm of natural
objects: form, colour and sound. The sculptor uses form and imitates
its perfection in so far as the chisel is able to imitate life. The
draughtsman, likewise a copyist, seeks in black and white to give the
illusion of relief on a flat surface. To the difficulties of drawing
the painter adds those of colour, which are no less great.
An inexhaustible model sits to all three. Rich though the painter’s
palette be, it will always be inferior to that of reality. Nor will the
sculptor’s chisel ever exhaust the treasures of the plastic art in
nature. Form and colour, beauty of outline and play of light: these are
all taught by the contemplation of actual things. They are imitated,
they are combined according to our tastes, but they are not invented.
On the other hand, our music has no prototype in the symphony of
created things. Certainly there is no lack of sounds, faint or loud,
sweet and solemn. The wind roaring through the storm-tossed woods, the
waves curling and breaking on the beach, the thunder growling in the
echoing clouds stir us with their majestic notes; the breeze filtering
through the tiny foliage of the pine-trees, the Bees humming over the
spring flowers charm every ear endowed with any delicacy; but these are
monotonous noises, with no connection. Nature has superb sounds; she
has no music.
Howling, braying, grunting, neighing, bellowing, bleating, yelping:
these exhaust the phonetics of our near neighbours in organization. A
musical score composed of such elements would be called a hullabaloo.
Man, forming a striking exception at the top of the scale of these
makers of raucous noises, took it into his head to sing. An attribute
which no other shares with him, the attribute of coordinated sounds
whence springs the incomparable gift of speech, led him on to
scientific vocal exercises. In the absence of a model, it must have
been a laborious apprenticeship.
When our prehistoric ancestor, to celebrate his return from hunting the
Mammoth, intoxicated himself with sour tipple brewed from raspberries
and sloes, what can have issued from his hoarse larynx? An orthodox
melody? Certainly not; hoarse shouts, rather, capable of shaking the
roof of his cave. The loudness of the cry constituted its merit. The
primitive song is found to this day when men’s throats are fired in
taverns instead of caverns.
And this tenor, with his crude vocal efforts, was already an adept at
guiding his pointed flint to engrave on ivory the effigy of the
monstrous animal which he had captured; he knew how to embellish his
idol’s cheeks with red chalk; he knew how to paint his own face with
coloured grease. There were plenty of models for form and colour but
none for rhythmic sounds.
With progress came the musical instrument, as an adjunct to those first
guttural attempts. Men blew down tubes taken all in one piece from the
sappy branches; they produced sounds from the barley-stalks and made
whistles out of reeds. The shell of a Snail, held between two fingers
of the closed fist, imitated the Partridge’s call; a trumpet formed of
a wide strip of bark rolled into a horn reproduced the bellowing of the
Bull; a few gut-strings stretched across the empty shell of a calabash
grated out the first notes of our stringed instruments; a Goat’s
bladder, fixed on a solid frame, was the original drum; two flat
pebbles struck together at measured intervals led the way for the click
of the castagnettes. Such must have been the primitive musical
materials, materials still preserved by the child, which, with its
simplicity in things artistic, is so strongly reminiscent of the big
child of yore.
Classical antiquity knew no others, as witness the shepherds of
Theocritus and Virgil.
Silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena,
says Meliboeus to Tityrus. [53]
What are we to make of this oat-straw, this frail shepherd’s pipe, as
they used to make us translate it in my young days? Did the poet write
avena tenui by way of a rhetorical figure, or was he describing a
reality? I vote for the reality, having myself in the old days heard a
concert of shepherd’s pipes.
It was in Corsica, at Ajaccio. In gratitude for a handful of
sugar-plums, some small boys of the neighbourhood came one day and
serenaded me. Quite unexpectedly, in gusts of untutored harmony,
strange sounds of rare sweetness reached my ears. I ran to the window.
There stood the orchestra, none taller than a jack-boot, gathered
solemnly in a ring, with the leader in the middle. Most of them had at
their lips a green onion-stem, distended spindlewise; others a stubble
straw, a bit of reed not yet hardened by maturity.
They blew into these, or rather they sang a vocero, to a grave measure,
perhaps a relic of the Greeks. Certainly, it was not music as we
understand it; still less was it a meaningless noise; but it was a
vague, undulating melody, abounding in artless irregularities, a medley
of pretty sounds in which the sibilations of the straw threw into
relief the bleating of the swollen stalks. I stood amazed at the
onion-stem symphony. Very much so must the shepherds of the eclogue
have gone to work, avena tenui; very much so must the bridal
epithalamium have been sung in the Reindeer period.
Yes, the simple melody of my Corsican youngsters, a real humming of
Bees on the rosemaries, has left a lasting trace in my memory. I can
hear it now. It taught me the value of the rustic pipes, once so
constantly celebrated in a literature that is now old-fashioned. How
far removed are we from those simple joys! To charm the populace in
these days you need ophicleides, saxhorns, trombones, cornets, every
imaginable sort of brass, with big drums and little drums and, to beat
time, a gun-shot. That’s what progress does.
Three-and-twenty centuries ago, Greece assembled at Delphi for the
festivals of the sun, Phœbus with the golden locks. Thrilled with
religious emotion she listened to the Hymn of Apollo, a melody of a few
lines, barely supported here and there by a scanty chord on the flute
and cithara. Hailed as a masterpiece, the sacred song was engraved on
marble tablets which the archæologists have recently exhumed.
The venerable strains, the oldest in musical records, have been heard
in my time in the ancient theatre at Orange, a ruin in stone worthy of
that ruin of sound. I was not present at the performance, being kept
away by my habit of running to the west whenever there are fireworks in
the east. One of my friends, a man gifted with a very sensitive ear,
went; and he said to me afterwards:
“There were probably ten thousand people forming the audience in the
enormous amphitheatre. I very much doubt whether one of them understood
that music of another age. As for me, I felt as if I were listening to
a blind man’s plaintive ditty and I looked round involuntarily for the
dog holding the cup.”
The barbarian, to turn the Greek masterpiece into a stupid wail! Was it
irreverence on his part? No, but it was incapacity. His ear, trained in
accordance with other rules, was unable to take pleasure in artless
sounds which had become strange and even disagreeable owing to their
great age. What my friend lacked, what we all lack is the perception of
those primitive niceties which have been stifled by the centuries. To
enjoy the Hymn to Apollo, we should have to go back to the simplicity
of soul which one day made me think the buzzing of the onion-stalks
delightful. And that we shall never do.
But, if our music need not draw its inspiration from the Delphic
marbles, our statuary and our architecture will always find models of
incomparable perfection in the work of the Greeks. The art of sounds,
having no prototype imposed on it by natural facts, is liable to
change: with our fickle tastes, that which is perfect in music to-day
becomes vulgar and commonplace to-morrow. The art of forms, on the
contrary, being based on the immutable foundation of reality, always
sees the beautiful where previous centuries saw it.
There is no musical type anywhere, not even in the song of the
Nightingale, celebrated by Buffon [54] in grandiloquent terms. I have
no wish to shock anybody; but why should I not give my opinion?
Buffon’s style and the Nightingale’s song both leave me cold. The first
has too much rhetoric about it and not enough sincere emotion. The
second, a magnificent jewel-case of ill-assorted pearls of sound, makes
so slight an appeal to the soul that a penny jug, filled with water and
furnished with a whistle, will enable the lips of a child to reproduce
the celebrated songster’s finest trills. A little earthenware machine,
warbling at the player’s will, rivals the Nightingale.
Above the bird, that glorious production of a vibrating air-column,
creatures roar and bray and grunt, until we come to man, who alone
speaks and really sings. Below the bird, they croak or are silent. The
bellows of the lungs have two efflorescences separated by enormous
empty spaces filled with formless sounds. Lower down still is the
insect, which is much earlier in date. This first-born of the dwellers
on the earth is also the first singer. Deprived of the breath which
could set the vocal cords vibrating, it invents the bow and friction,
of which man is later to make such wonderful use.
Various Beetles produce a noise by sliding one rugged surface over
another. The Capricorn moves his corseleted segment over its junction
with the rest of the thorax; the Pine Cockchafer, [55] with his great
fan-shaped antennæ, rubs his last dorsal segment with the edge of his
wing-cases; the Copris [56] and many more know no other method. To tell
the truth, these scrapers do not produce a musical sound, but rather a
creaking like that of a weathercock on its rusty pin, a thin, sharp
sound with no resonance in it.
Among these inexperienced scrapers, I will select the Bolboceras (B.
gallicus, Muls.), [57] as deserving honourable mention. Round as a
ball, sporting a horn on his forehead, like the Spanish Copris, whose
stercoral tastes he does not share, this pretty Beetle loves the
pine-woods in my neighbourhood and digs himself a burrow in the sand,
leaving it in the evening twilight with the gentle chirp of a well-fed
nestling under its mother’s wing. Though habitually silent, he makes a
noise at the least disturbance. A dozen of him imprisoned in a box will
provide you with a delightful symphony, very faint, it is true: you
have to hold the box close to your ear to hear it. Compared with him,
the Capricorn, Copris, Pine Cockchafer and the rest are rustic
fiddlers. In their case, after all, it is not singing, but rather an
expression of fear, I might almost say, a cry of anguish, a moan. The
insect utters it only in a moment of danger and never, so far as I
know, at the time of its wedding.
The real musician, who expresses his gladness by strokes of the bow and
cymbals, dates much farther back. He preceded the insects endowed with
a superior organization, the Beetle, the Bee, the Fly, the Butterfly,
who prove their higher rank by complete transformations; he is closely
connected with the rude beginnings of the geological period. The
singing insect, in fact, belongs exclusively either to the order of the
Hemiptera, including the Cicadæ, or to that of the Orthoptera,
including the Grasshoppers and Crickets. Its incomplete metamorphoses
link it with those primitive races whose records are inscribed in our
coal-seams. It is one of the first that mingled the sounds of life with
the vague murmuring of inert things. It was singing before the reptile
had learnt to breathe.
This shows, from the mere point of view of sound, the futility of those
theories of ours which try to explain the world by the automatic
evolution of progress nascent in the primitive cell. All is yet dumb;
and already the insect is stridulating as correctly as it does to-day.
Phonetics start with an apparatus which the ages will hand down to one
another without changing any essential part of it. Then, though the
lungs have appeared, we have silence, save for the heavy breathing of
the nostrils. But lo, one day, the Frog croaks; and soon, with no
preparation, there are mingled with this hideous concert the trills of
the Quail, the whistled stanzas of the Thrush and the Warbler’s musical
strains. The larynx in its highest form has come into existence. What
will the late-comers do with it? The Ass and the Wild Boar give us our
reply. We find something worse than marking time, we find an enormous
retrogression, until one last bound brings us to man’s own larynx.
In this genesis of sounds it is impossible to talk authoritatively of a
steady progression which makes the middling follow on the bad and the
excellent on the middling. We see nothing but abrupt excursions,
intermittences, recoils, sudden expansions not foretold by what has
gone before nor continued by that which follows; we find nothing but a
riddle whose solution does not lie in the virtues of the cell alone,
that easy pillow for whoso has not the courage to search deeper.
But let us leave the question of origins, that inaccessible domain, and
come down to facts; let us cross-examine a few representatives of those
old races who were the earliest exponents of the art of sounds and took
it into their heads to sing at a time when the mud of the first
continents was hardening; let us ask them how their instrument is
constructed and what is the object of their ditty.
The Grasshopper, so remarkable both for the length and thickness of her
hinder thighs and for her ovipositor, the sabre or dibble which plants
her eggs, is one of the chief performers in the entomological concert.
Indeed, if we except the Cicada, who is often confused with her, she is
responsible for the greater part of the noise. Only one of the
Orthoptera surpasses her; and that is the Cricket, her near neighbour.
Let us first listen to the White-faced Decticus.
The performance begins with a hard, sharp, almost metallic sound, very
like that emitted by the Thrush keeping a sharp look-out while he
stuffs himself with olives. It consists of a series of isolated notes,
tick-tick, with a longish pause between them. Then, with a gradual
crescendo, the song develops into a rapid clicking in which the
fundamental tick-tick is accompanied by a continuous droning bass. At
the end the crescendo becomes so loud that the metallic note disappears
and the sound is transformed into a mere rustle, a frrrr-frrrr-frrrr of
the greatest rapidity.
The performer goes on like this for hours, with alternating strophes
and rests. In calm weather, the song, at its height, can be heard
twenty steps away. That is no great distance. The noise made by the
Cicada and the Cricket carries much farther.
How are the strains produced? The books which I am able to consult
leave me perplexed. They tell me of the “mirror,” a thin, quivering
membrane which glistens like a blade of mica; but how is this membrane
made to vibrate? That is what they either do not tell us or else tell
us very vaguely and inaccurately, talking of a friction of the
wing-cases, mutual rubbing of the nervures; and that is all.
I should like a more lucid explanation, for a Grasshopper’s
musical-box, I feel certain in advance, must have an exact mechanism of
its own. Let us therefore look into the matter, even though we have to
repeat observations already perhaps made by others, but unknown to a
recluse like myself, whose whole library consists of a few old odd
volumes.
The Decticus’ wing-cases widen at the base and form on the insect’s
back a flat sunken surface shaped like an elongated triangle. This is
the sounding-board. Here the left wing-case folds over the right and,
when at rest, completely covers the latter’s musical apparatus. The
most distinct and, from time immemorial, the best-known part of it is
the mirror, thus called because of the shininess of its thin oval
membrane, set in the frame of a nervure. It is very like the skin of a
drum, of an exquisitely delicate tympanum, with this difference, that
it sounds without being tapped. Nothing touches the mirror when the
Decticus sings. Its vibrations are imparted to it after starting
elsewhere. And how? I will tell you.
Its edging is prolonged at the inner angle of the base by a wide, blunt
tooth, furnished at the end with a more prominent and powerful fold
than the other nervures distributed here and there. I will call this
fold the friction-nervure. This is the starting-point of the concussion
that makes the mirror resound. The evidence will appear when the
remainder of the apparatus is known.
This remainder, the motor mechanism, is on the left wing-case, covering
the other with its flat edge. Outside, there is nothing remarkable,
unless it be—and even then one has to be on the look-out for it—a sort
of slightly slanting, transversal pad, which might very easily be taken
for a thicker nervure than the others.
But examine the lower surface through the magnifying-glass. The pad is
much more than an ordinary nervure. It is an instrument of the highest
precision, a magnificent indented bow, marvellously regular on its
diminutive scale. Never did human industry, when cutting metal for the
most delicate clockwork mechanism, achieve such perfection. Its shape
is that of a curved spindle. From one end to the other there have been
cut across this bow about eighty triangular teeth, which are very even
and are of some hard, durable material, dark-brown in colour.
The use of this mechanical gem is obvious. If we take a dead Decticus
and lift the flat rim of the two wing-cases slightly in order to place
them in the position which they occupy when sounding, we see the bow
fitting its indentations to the terminal nervure which I have called
the friction-nervure; we follow the line of teeth which, from end to
end of the row, never swerve from the points to be set in motion; and,
if the operation be done at all dexterously, the dead insect sings,
that is to say, strikes a few of its clicking notes.
The secret of the sounds produced by the Decticus is out. The toothed
bow of the left wing-case is the motor; the friction-nervure of the
right wing-case is the point of concussion; the stretched membrane of
the mirror is the resonator, to which vibration is communicated by the
shaking of the surrounding frame. Our own music has many vibrating
membranes; but these are always affected by direct percussion. Bolder
than our makers of musical instruments, the Decticus combines the bow
with the drum.
The same combination is found in the other Grasshoppers. The most
famous of these is the Green Grasshopper (Locusta viridissima, Lin.),
who to the qualities of a handsome stature and a fine green colour adds
the honour of classical renown. In La Fontaine she is the Cicada who
comes alms-begging of the Ant when the north wind blows. Flies and
Grubs being scarce, the would-be borrower asks for a few grains to live
upon until next summer. The double diet, animal and vegetable, is a
very happy inspiration on the fabulist’s part.
The Grasshopper, in fact, has the same tastes as the Decticus. In my
cages, he feeds on lettuce-leaves when there is nothing better going;
but his preference is all in favour of the Locust, whom he crunches up
without leaving anything but the wing-cases and wings. In a state of
liberty, his preying on that ravenous browser must largely make up to
us for the small toll which he levies on our agricultural produce.
Except in a few details, his musical instrument is the same as that of
the Decticus. It occupies, at the base of the wing-cases, a large
sunken surface shaped like a curved triangle and brownish in colour,
with a dull-yellow rim. It is a sort of escutcheon, emblazoned with
heraldic devices. On the under surface of the left wing-case, which is
folded over the right, two transversal, parallel grooves are cut. The
space between them makes a ridge which constitutes the bow. The latter,
a brown spindle, has a set of fine, very regular and very numerous
teeth. The mirror of the right wing-case is almost circular, well
framed and supplied with a strong and prominent friction-nervure.
The insect stridulates in July and August, in the evening twilight,
until close upon ten o’clock. It produces a quick, rattling noise,
accompanied by a faint metallic clicking which barely passes the border
of perceptible sounds. The abdomen, considerably lowered, throbs and
beats the measure. This goes on for irregular periods and suddenly
ceases; in between these periods there are false starts reduced to a
few strokes of the bow; there are pauses and then the stridulation is
once more in full swing.
All said, it is a very meagre performance, greatly inferior in volume
to that of the Decticus, not to be compared with the song of the
Cricket and even less with the harsh and noisy efforts of the Cicada.
In the quiet of the evening, when only a few steps away, I need little
Paul’s delicate ear to apprise me of it.
It is poorer still in the two dwarf Dectici of my neighbourhood,
Platycleis intermedia, Serv., and P. grisea, Fab., both of whom are
common in the long grass, where the ground is stony and exposed to the
sun, and quick to disappear in the undergrowth when you try to catch
them. These two fat songsters have each had the doubtful privilege of a
place in my cages.
Here, in a blazing sun beating straight upon the window, are my little
Dectici crammed with green millet-seeds and also with game. Most of
them are lying in the hottest places, on their bellies or sides, with
their hind-legs outstretched. For hours on end they digest without
moving and slumber in their voluptuous attitude. Some of them sing. Oh,
what a feeble song!
The ditty of the Intermediary Decticus, with its strophes and pauses
alternating at equal intervals, is a rapid fr-r-r-r similar to the
Coaltit’s, while that of the Grey Decticus consists of distinct strokes
of the bow and tends to copy the Cricket’s melody, with a note which is
hoarser and, in particular, much fainter. In both cases, the feebleness
of the sound hardly allows me to hear the singer a couple of yards
away.
And to produce this music, this insignificant and only just perceptible
refrain, the two dwarfs have all that their big cousin possesses: a
toothed bow, a tambourine, a friction-nervure. On the bow of the Grey
Decticus I count about forty teeth and eighty on that of the
Intermediary Decticus. Moreover, in both, the right wing-case displays,
around the mirror, a few diaphanous spaces, intended no doubt to
increase the extent of the vibrating portion. It makes no difference:
though the instrument is magnificent, the production of sound is very
poor.
With this same mechanism of a drum and file, which of them will achieve
any progress? Not one of the large-winged Locustidæ succeeds in doing
so. All, from the biggest, the Grasshoppers, Dectici and Conocephali,
down to the smallest, the Platycleis, Xiphidion and Phaneropteron, set
in motion with the teeth of a bow the frame of a vibrating-mirror; all
are, so to speak, left-handed, that is to say, they carry the bow on
the lower surface of the left wing-case, overlapping the right, which
is furnished with the tympanum; all, lastly, have a thin, faint trill
which is sometimes hardly perceptible.
One alone, modifying the details of the apparatus without introducing
any innovation into the general structure, achieves a certain power of
sound. This is the Vine Ephippiger, who does without wings and reduces
his wing-cases to two concave scales, elegantly fluted and fitting one
into the other. These two disks are all that remains of the organs of
flight, which have become exclusively organs of song. The insect
abandons flying to devote itself the better to stridulation.
It shelters its instrument under a sort of dome formed by the corselet,
which is curved saddlewise. As usual, the left scale occupies the upper
position and bears on its lower surface a file in which we can
distinguish with the lens eighty transversal denticulations, more
powerful and more clearly cut than those possessed by any other of the
Grasshopper tribe. The right scale is underneath. At the top of its
slightly flattened dome, the mirror gleams, framed in a strong nervure.
For elegance of structure, this instrument is superior to the Cicada’s,
in which the contraction of two columns of muscles alternately pulls in
and lets out the convex surface of two barren cymbals. It needs
sound-chambers, resonators, to become a noisy apparatus. As things are,
it emits a lingering and plaintive tchi-i-i, tchi-i-i, tchi-i-i, in a
minor key, which is heard even farther than the blithe bowing of the
White-faced Decticus.
When disturbed in their repose, the Decticus and the other Grasshoppers
at once become silent, struck dumb with fear. With them, singing
invariably expresses gladness. The Ephippiger also dreads to be
disturbed and baffles with his sudden silence whoso seeks to find him.
But take him between your fingers. Often he will resume his
stridulation with erratic strokes of the bow. At such times the song
denotes anything but happiness, fear rather and all the anguish of
danger. The Cicada likewise rattles more shrilly than ever when a
ruthless child dislocates his abdomen and forces open his chapels. In
both cases, the gay refrain of the mirthful insect turns into the
lamentation of a persecuted victim.
A second peculiarity of the Ephippiger’s, unknown to the other singing
insects, is worthy of remark. Both sexes are endowed with the
sound-producing apparatus. The female, who, in the other Grasshoppers,
is always dumb, with not even a vestige of bow or mirror, acquires in
this instance a musical instrument which is a close copy of the male’s.
The left scale covers the right. Its edges are fluted with thick, pale
nervures, forming a fine-meshed network; the centre, on the other hand,
is smooth and swells into an amber-coloured dome. Underneath, this dome
is supplied with two concurrent nervures, the chief of which is
slightly wrinkled on its ridge. The right scale is similarly
constructed, but for one detail: the central dome, which also is
amber-coloured, is traversed by a nervure which describes a sort of
sinuous line and which, under the magnifying-glass, reveals very fine
transversal teeth throughout the greater part of its length.
This feature betrays the bow, placed in the inverse position to that
which is known to us. The male is left-handed and works with his upper
wing-case; the female is right-handed and scrapes with her lower
wing-case. Besides, with her, there is no such thing as a mirror, that
is to say, no shiny membrane resembling a flake of mica. The bow rubs
across the rough vein of the opposite scale and in this way produces
simultaneous vibration in the two fitted spherical domes.
The vibrating part is double, therefore, but too stiff and clumsy to
produce a sound of any depth. The song, in any case rather thin, is
even more plaintive than the male’s. The insect is not lavish with it.
If I do not interfere, my captives never add their note to the concert
of their caged companions; on the other hand, when seized and worried,
they utter a moan at once. It seems likely that, in a state of liberty,
things happen otherwise. The dumb beauties in my bell-jars are not for
nothing endowed with a double cymbal and a bow. The instrument that
moans with fright must also ring out joyously on occasion.
What purpose is served by the Grasshopper’s sound-apparatus? I will not
go so far as to refuse it a part in the pairing, or to deny it a
persuasive murmur, sweet to her who hears it: that would be flying in
the face of the evidence. But this is not its principal function.
Before anything else, the insect uses it to express its joy in living,
to sing the delights of existence with a belly well filled and a back
warmed by the sun, as witness the big Decticus and the male
Grasshopper, who, after the wedding, exhausted for good and all and
taking no further interest in pairing, continue to stridulate merrily
as long as their strength holds out.
The Grasshopper tribe has its bursts of gladness; it has moreover the
advantage of being able to express them with a sound, the simple
satisfaction of the artist. The little journeyman whom I see in the
evening returning from the workyard on his way home, where his supper
awaits him, whistles and sings for his own pleasure, with no intention
of making himself heard, nor any wish to attract an audience. In his
artless and almost unconscious fashion, he tells the joys of a hard
day’s work done and of his plateful of steaming cabbage. Even so most
often does the singing insect stridulate: it is celebrating life.
Some go farther. If existence has its sweets, it also has its sorrows.
The saddle-bearing Grasshopper of the vines is able to translate both
of these into sound. In a trailing melody, he sings to the bushes of
his happiness; in a like melody, hardly altered, he pours forth his
griefs and his fears. His mate, herself an instrumentalist, shares this
privilege. She exults and laments with two cymbals of another pattern.
When all is said, the cogged drum need not be looked down upon. It
enlivens the lawns, murmurs the joys and tribulations of existence,
sends the lover’s call echoing all around, brightens the weary waiting
of the lonely ones, tells of the perfect blossoming of insect life. Its
stroke of the bow is almost a voice.
And this magnificent gift, so full of promise, is granted only to the
inferior races, coarse natures, near akin to the crude beginnings of
the carboniferous period. If, as we are told, the superior insect
descends from ancestors who have been gradually transformed, why did it
not preserve that fine inheritance of a voice which has sounded from
the earliest ages?
Can it be that the theory of progressive acquirements is only a
specious lure? Are we to abandon the savage theory of the crushing of
the weak by the strong, of the less well-endowed by their more
highly-gifted rivals? Is it permissible to doubt, when the
evolutionists talk to us of the survival of the fittest? Yes, indeed it
is!
We are told as much by a certain Libellula of the carboniferous age
(Meganeura Monyi, Brong.), measuring over two feet across the wings.
The giant Dragon-fly, who terrified the small winged folk with her
sawlike mandibles, has disappeared, whereas the puny Agrion, with her
bronze or azure abdomen, still hovers over the reeds of our rivers.
So have her contemporaries disappeared, the monstrous sauroid fishes,
mailed in enamel and armed to the teeth. Their scarce successors are
mere abortions. The splendid series of Cephalopods with partitioned
shells, including certain Ammonites of the diameter of a cartwheel, has
no other representative in our present seas than that modest fireman’s
helmet, the Nautilus. The Megalosaurus, a saurian twenty-five yards
long, was a more alarming figure in our country-sides than the Grey
Lizard of the walls. One of man’s contemporaries, that monumental beast
the Mammoth, is known only by his remains; and his near kinsman the
Elephant, a mere Sheep beside him, goes on prospering. What a shock to
the law of the survival of the strongest! The mighty have gone under;
and the weak fill their place.