The mole-cricket is, like the grasshopper, a child of summer. It differs, moreover, from the "cricket on the hearth" in lacking those organs of _stridulation_ (excuse the word, kind reader!) which mark "the glad silent moments" with their tricksome (and sometimes inconvenient) tune. Their posterior thighs have an apparent bulging about them, but the legs are very short; so short, that our little friend could not compete with its cousin, the grasshopper, in vaulting exercises, even were it not otherwise prevented by its large abdomen. Nor is it much assisted by its wings, for though they are broad, they are not organised for rapid flight, and the mole-cricket makes but little use of them. Nature, however, has compensated it for all these disadvantages by the gift of those strong, powerful, flexible fore-feet of which I have already spoken. The species generally met with in gardens, corn-fields, and orchards is the _Gryllotalpa vulgaris_ of Latreille, identical with the _Gryllus gryllotalpa_ of Linnæus. It has a brown head, garnished with rusty-coloured mandibles; the thorax is of a brownish-gray, velvety, tinged with red in the fore parts; the elytra, or wing-sheaths, which are much shorter than the abdomen, are gray, and marked by black and conspicuously prominent nerves; the wings, folded back like a fan, are about one-fourth longer than the abdomen. * * * * * The mole-cricket,--mark me!--is no more of a root-eater than the mole; it is carnivorous, like the Staphylinus. As an experiment in confirmation of this statement, we shut up one of these curious Orthopteras in a large chest filled with mould. Concealed in the galleries which it speedily constructed for its use, it fed upon larvæ, and never touched the cereals which we had sown in the earth. Here was a proof that we had to plead the cause of another of man's victims. The mole-cricket ejects, when pursued or tormented, a blackish liquid, whose etherealised odour reminds one of the peculiar smell of certain rotten apples. The female, larger than the male, lays her eggs, which are, comparatively speaking, of a tolerable size (Fig. 62, _b_), at some depth underground. The young, when hatched, resemble their parents, except that they are white, and possess merely the rudiments of wings. If the mole-cricket, in its subterranean progress, encounters any roots, it cuts them with its mandibles, not to feed upon them, but to get rid of an obstacle; hence the mischief of which the farmer accuses it, though this slight amount of injury is altogether outweighed by its services in destroying a swarm of insects. Perhaps, therefore, we must not blame the farmer for the hostility with which he pursues it, especially if we are to accept as a true picture of its doings the sketch recently drawn by a popular writer:--