Among these inexperienced scrapers, I will select the Bolboceras (B. gallicus, Muls.), [57] as deserving honourable mention. Round as a ball, sporting a horn on his forehead, like the Spanish Copris, whose stercoral tastes he does not share, this pretty Beetle loves the pine-woods in my neighbourhood and digs himself a burrow in the sand, leaving it in the evening twilight with the gentle chirp of a well-fed nestling under its mother’s wing. Though habitually silent, he makes a noise at the least disturbance. A dozen of him imprisoned in a box will provide you with a delightful symphony, very faint, it is true: you have to hold the box close to your ear to hear it. Compared with him, the Capricorn, Copris, Pine Cockchafer and the rest are rustic fiddlers. In their case, after all, it is not singing, but rather an expression of fear, I might almost say, a cry of anguish, a moan. The insect utters it only in a moment of danger and never, so far as I know, at the time of its wedding. The real musician, who expresses his gladness by strokes of the bow and cymbals, dates much farther back. He preceded the insects endowed with a superior organization, the Beetle, the Bee, the Fly, the Butterfly, who prove their higher rank by complete transformations; he is closely connected with the rude beginnings of the geological period. The singing insect, in fact, belongs exclusively either to the order of the Hemiptera, including the Cicadæ, or to that of the Orthoptera, including the Grasshoppers and Crickets. Its incomplete metamorphoses link it with those primitive races whose records are inscribed in our coal-seams. It is one of the first that mingled the sounds of life with the vague murmuring of inert things. It was singing before the reptile had learnt to breathe. This shows, from the mere point of view of sound, the futility of those theories of ours which try to explain the world by the automatic evolution of progress nascent in the primitive cell. All is yet dumb; and already the insect is stridulating as correctly as it does to-day. Phonetics start with an apparatus which the ages will hand down to one another without changing any essential part of it. Then, though the lungs have appeared, we have silence, save for the heavy breathing of the nostrils. But lo, one day, the Frog croaks; and soon, with no preparation, there are mingled with this hideous concert the trills of the Quail, the whistled stanzas of the Thrush and the Warbler’s musical strains. The larynx in its highest form has come into existence. What will the late-comers do with it? The Ass and the Wild Boar give us our reply. We find something worse than marking time, we find an enormous retrogression, until one last bound brings us to man’s own larynx.