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]