To excel the Cicada in singing was the highest commendation of a singer, and the music of Plato’s eloquence was only comparable to the voice of this insect. Homer compared his good orators to the Cicadæ, “which, in the woods, sitting on a tree, send forth a delicate voice.”[873] But Virgil speaks of them as insects of a disagreeable and stridulous tone, and accuses them of bursting the very shrubs with their noise,-- Et cantu querulæ rumpent arbusta Cicadæ.[874] Moufet says: “The Cicadæ, abounding in the end of spring, do foretel a sickly year to come, not that they are the cause of putrefaction in themselves, but only shew plenty of putrid matter to be, when there is such store of them appear. Oftentimes their coming and singing doth portend the happy state of things: so also says Theocritus. Niphus saith that what year but few of them are to be seen, they presage dearness of victuals, and scarcity of all things else.... “The Egyptians, by a Cicada painted, understood a priest and an holy man; the latter makers of hieroglyphics sometimes will have them to signifie musicians, sometimes pratlers or talkative companions, but very fondly. How ever the matter be, the Cicada hath sung very well of herself, in my judgement, in this following distich: Although I am an insect very small, Yet with great virtue am endow’d withall.”[875] Sir G. Staunton, in his account of China, remarks: “The shops of Hai-tien, in addition to necessaries, abounded in toys and trifles, calculated to amuse the rich and idle of both sexes, even to cages containing insects, such as the noisy Cicada, and a large species of the Gryllus.”[876] S. Wells Williams tells us that the Chinese boys often capture the male Cicada of their country, and tie a straw around the abdomen, so as to irritate the sounding apparatus, and carry it through the streets in this predicament, to the great annoyance of every one, for the stridulous sound of this insect is of deafening loudness.[877] When in Quincy, Illinois, in the summer of 1864, I was shown by a boy a toy, which he called a “Locust,” with which he imitated the loud rattling noise of the _Cicada septemdecim_ with great accuracy. It consisted of a horse-hair tied to the end of a short stick, and looped in a cap of stiff writing-paper placed over the hole of a spool. To make the sound, then, the toy was whirled rapidly through the air, when the stiff paper acted as a sounding-board to the vibrating hair. At Surinam, Madame Merian tells us, the noise of the _Cicada tibicen_ is still supposed to resemble the sound of a harp or lyre, and hence called the _Lierman_--the harper.[878] Another species, in Ceylon, which makes the forest re-echo with a long-sustained noise so curiously resembling that of a cutler’s wheel, has acquired the highly appropriate name of the _Knife-grinder_.[879]