This feature betrays the bow, placed in the inverse position to that which is known to us. The male is left-handed and works with his upper wing-case; the female is right-handed and scrapes with her lower wing-case. Besides, with her, there is no such thing as a mirror, that is to say, no shiny membrane resembling a flake of mica. The bow rubs across the rough vein of the opposite scale and in this way produces simultaneous vibration in the two fitted spherical domes. The vibrating part is double, therefore, but too stiff and clumsy to produce a sound of any depth. The song, in any case rather thin, is even more plaintive than the male’s. The insect is not lavish with it. If I do not interfere, my captives never add their note to the concert of their caged companions; on the other hand, when seized and worried, they utter a moan at once. It seems likely that, in a state of liberty, things happen otherwise. The dumb beauties in my bell-jars are not for nothing endowed with a double cymbal and a bow. The instrument that moans with fright must also ring out joyously on occasion. What purpose is served by the Grasshopper’s sound-apparatus? I will not go so far as to refuse it a part in the pairing, or to deny it a persuasive murmur, sweet to her who hears it: that would be flying in the face of the evidence. But this is not its principal function. Before anything else, the insect uses it to express its joy in living, to sing the delights of existence with a belly well filled and a back warmed by the sun, as witness the big Decticus and the male Grasshopper, who, after the wedding, exhausted for good and all and taking no further interest in pairing, continue to stridulate merrily as long as their strength holds out. The Grasshopper tribe has its bursts of gladness; it has moreover the advantage of being able to express them with a sound, the simple satisfaction of the artist. The little journeyman whom I see in the evening returning from the workyard on his way home, where his supper awaits him, whistles and sings for his own pleasure, with no intention of making himself heard, nor any wish to attract an audience. In his artless and almost unconscious fashion, he tells the joys of a hard day’s work done and of his plateful of steaming cabbage. Even so most often does the singing insect stridulate: it is celebrating life. Some go farther. If existence has its sweets, it also has its sorrows. The saddle-bearing Grasshopper of the vines is able to translate both of these into sound. In a trailing melody, he sings to the bushes of his happiness; in a like melody, hardly altered, he pours forth his griefs and his fears. His mate, herself an instrumentalist, shares this privilege. She exults and laments with two cymbals of another pattern.