Veil your face, O foolish experimenter, overconfident in your mischievous straw! You thought that you had created a new type of instrumentalist; and you have obtained nothing at all. The Cricket has thwarted your schemes: he is scraping with his right fiddlestick and always will. With a painful effort, he has dislocated his shoulders, which were made to mature and harden the wrong way; and, in spite of a set that seemed definite, he has put back on top that which ought to be on top and underneath that which ought to be underneath. Your sorry science tried to make a left-handed player of him. He laughs at your devices and settles down to be right-handed for the rest of his life. Franklin left an eloquent plea on behalf of the left hand, which, he considered, deserved as careful training as its fellow. What an immense advantage it would be thus to have two servants each as capable as the other! Yes, certainly; but, except for a few rare instances, is this equality of strength and skill in the two hands possible? The Cricket answers no: there is an original weakness in the left side, a want of balance, which habit and training can to a certain extent correct, but which they can never cause wholly to disappear. Though shaped by a training which takes it at its birth and moulds and solidifies it on the top of the other, the left wing-case none the less resumes the lower position when the insect tries to sing. As to the cause of this original inferiority, that is a problem which belongs to embryogenesis. My failure confirms the fact that the left wing-case is unable to make use of its bow, even when supplemented by the aid of art. Then what is the object of that hook whose exquisite precision yields in no respect to that of the other? We might appeal to reasons of symmetry and talk about the repetition of an archetypal design, as I, for want of a better argument, did just now in the matter of the cast raiment which the young Cricket leaves on the threshold of his ovular sheath; but I prefer to confess that this would be but the semblance of an explanation, wrapped up in specious language. For the Decticus, the Grasshopper and the other Locustidæ would come and show us their wing-cases, one with the bow only, the other with the mirror, and say: “Why should the Cricket, our near kinsman, be symmetrical, whereas all of us Locustidæ, without exception, are asymmetrical?” There is no valid answer to their objection. Let us confess our ignorance and humbly say: “I do not know.” It wants but a Midge’s wing to confound our proudest theories.