If any one were to tell me that the Cicadæ strum on their noisy instruments without giving a thought to the sound produced and for the sheer pleasure of feeling themselves alive, just as we rub our hands in a moment of satisfaction, I should not be greatly shocked. That there may be also a secondary object in their concert, an object in which the dumb sex is interested, is quite possible, quite natural, though this has not yet been proved. CHAPTER V THE CICADA: THE LAYING AND THE HATCHING OF THE EGGS The Common Cicada entrusts her eggs to small dry branches. All those which Réaumur examined and found to be thus tenanted were derived from the mulberry-tree: a proof that the person commissioned to collect these eggs in the Avignon district was very conservative in his methods of search. In addition to the mulberry-tree, I, on the other hand, find them on the peach, the cherry, the willow, the Japanese privet and other trees. But these are exceptions. The Cicada really favours something different. She wants, as far as possible, tiny stalks, which may be anything from the thickness of a straw to that of a lead-pencil, with a thin ring of wood and plenty of pith. So long as these conditions are fulfilled, the actual plant matters little. I should have to draw up a list of all the semiligneous flora of the district were I to try and catalogue the different supports used by the Cicada when laying her eggs. I shall content myself with naming a few of them in a note, to show the variety of sites of which she avails herself. [17] The sprig occupied is never lying on the ground; it is in a position more or less akin to the perpendicular, most often in its natural place, sometimes detached, but in that case sticking upright by accident. Preference is given to a good long stretch of smooth, even stalk, capable of accommodating the entire laying. My best harvests are made on the sprigs of Spartium junceum, which are like straws crammed with pith, and especially on the tall stalks of Asphodelus cerasiferus, which rise for nearly three feet before spreading into branches. The rule is for the support, no matter what it is, to be dead and quite dry. Nevertheless my notes record a few instances of eggs confided to stalks that are still alive, with green leaves and flowers in bloom. It is true that, in these highly exceptional cases, the stalk itself is of a pretty dry variety. [18] The work performed by the Cicada consists of a series of pricks such as might be made with a pin if it were driven downwards on a slant and made to tear the ligneous fibres and force them up slightly. Any one seeing these dots without knowing what produced them would think first of some cryptogamous vegetation, some Sphæriacea swelling and bursting its skin under the growth of its half-emerging perithecia.