"Quand la bise fut venue" means without doubt the month of November or December. But at this season of the year the Cicada has a long time since passed from life to death. When one wanders along the outskirts of woods as early as the month of October, in the south of France, one finds the soil covered with dead Cicadas. La Fontaine's _Cigale_ then could not have found itself "fort dépourvue," for the simple reason that it was already dead. "Elle alla crier famine Chez la Fourmi, sa voisine, La priant de lui preter Quelque grain pour subsister." The ant is carnivorous, and although it likes honey, it has nothing to do with grains of wheat, nor with any other grain, of which, according to the fabulist, it had laid up a stock. On the other hand, the Cicada, which he blames for having "Pas un seul petit morceau De mouche ou de vermisseau," never dreamt of such victuals, for it lives entirely on the sap of large vegetables. The fables of the poet, who is called in France, one never knows why, "Le bon La Fontaine," teem with errors of the same kind as those we have just pointed out. The habits of animals are nearly always represented as exactly the contrary to what they really are. To initiate himself into the mysteries of the habits of animals, La Fontaine certainly had neither the works of Buffon nor the memoirs of Réaumur, which had not then been written; but had he not the book of Nature? But it is time to mention the principal species of the Cicada. We will describe two: that of the Ash, which lives on those trees in the south of France; and that of the Manna Ash, which is very common in the south-east of France. It is particularly plentiful in the forests of pines which abound between Bayonne and Bordeaux. It is on these two species of Cicada that Réaumur made the beautiful observations of which we gave a summary above. The _Cicada plebeia_ or _Tettigonia fraxini_, very common in Provence, is found, though rarely, in the forest of Fontainebleau, occasionally in La Brie. It is of a grey yellow below, black above; the head and thorax are marked or striped with black. M. Solier, in a Memoir inserted in the "Annales de la Société Entomologique de France," says that its song, very loud and very piercing, seems to consist of one single note, repeated with rapidity, which insensibly grows weaker after a certain time, and terminates in a kind of whistle, which can be partly imitated by pronouncing the two consonants _st_, and which resembles the noise of the air coming out of a little opening in a compressed bladder. When the Cicada sings, it moves its abdomen violently, in such a manner as alternately to move it away from, and to bring it near to, the little covers of the sonorous cavities; to this movement is added a slight trembling of the mesothorax.