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}