Do you suffer from irritation of the kidneys, or perhaps from stricture? Quick, have some Cicada-tea! Nothing, they tell me, is so efficacious. I am duly grateful to the good soul who once, as I have since heard, made me drink a concoction of the sort, without my knowing it, for some trouble or other; but I remain profoundly incredulous. I am struck, however, by the fact that the same specific was recommended long ago by Dioscorides. The old Cilician doctor tells us: “Cicadæ, quæ inassatæ manduntur, vesicæ doloribus prosunt.” [15] Ever since the far-off days of this patriarch of materia medica, the Provençal peasant has retained his faith in the remedy revealed to him by the Greeks who brought the olive, the fig-tree and the vine from Phocæa. One thing alone is changed: Dioscorides advises us to eat our Cicadæ roasted; nowadays they are boiled and taken as an infusion. The explanation given of the insect’s diuretic properties is wonderfully ingenuous. The Cicada, as all of us here know, shoots a sudden spray of urine, as it flies away, in the face of any one who tries to take hold of it. He is therefore bound to hand on his powers of evacuation to us. Thus must Dioscorides and his contemporaries have argued; and thus does the peasant of Provence argue to this day. O my worthy friends, what would you say if you knew the virtues of the tettigometra, which is capable of mixing mortar with its urine to build a meteorological station withal! You would be driven to borrow the hyperbole of Rabelais, who shows us Gargantua seated on the towers of Notre-Dame and drowning with the deluge from his mighty bladder so many thousand Paris loafers, not to mention the women and children! CHAPTER IV THE CICADA: HIS MUSIC By his own confession, Réaumur never heard the Cicada sing; he never saw the insect alive. It reached him from the country round Avignon preserved in spirits and a goodly supply of sugar. These conditions were enough to enable the anatomist to give an exact description of the organ of sound; nor did the master fail to do so: his penetrating eye clearly discerned the construction of the strange musical-box, so much so that his treatise upon it has become the fountain-head for any one who wants to say a few words about the Cicada’s song. With him the harvest was gathered; it but remains to glean a few ears which the disciple hopes to make into a sheaf. I have more than enough of what Réaumur lacked: I hear rather more of these deafening symphonists than I could wish; and so I shall perhaps obtain a little fresh light on a subject that seems exhausted. Let us therefore go back to the question of the Cicada’s song, repeating only so much of the data acquired as may be necessary to make my explanation clear.