size in linear measurement of the very salient, _outré_-looking creature you are looking at. This, then, is the key to the mystery. England is full of cicadas, but they are all so small that nobody can see them—at least without taking some trouble. So our poets have been silent, our philosophers have made no reflections, and our ploughmen, to this day, are without a proper objective for those appreciative perceptions of life around them which, if it only existed, there might be some evidence of their possessing. Our aristocracy too, or old county families, have never been able to “think gold of themselves,” as the saying is, on account of their golden tettix-pins, though the feeling itself has not been entirely denied them. In a word, our national character has been uninfluenced by cicadas, and, on this, two questions arise: first—for it is no use to start on an assumption—whether faults exist in it, and then, if they do, whether all or any of them are due to this cause. But such matters are for the historian to deal with, and would be out of place in the pages of a work like this. Though cicadas are so small in England—whilst their voices, if they have any, as there seems no particular reason to doubt, are too attenuated to be audible to our human ears—yet they are not quite invisible. When seen, however, they are known by some other name, such as frog-hoppers, tree-hoppers, or the like. Some of these, in their larval stage, which much resembles the adult, take a great deal of pains to conceal themselves, though in this they have another reason than that of wishing to elude observation. Our common cuckoo-spit is a good instance of this, and also of how a wrong explanation of a common and easily observed phenomenon may for a long time be given, not only in popular works, but also in scientific text-books or monographs, or within the supposedly up-to-date pages of various encyclopædias. The cuckoo-spit, as everyone knows, sits in the midst of a little bower of froth (allied to that other of bliss perhaps) which, on being examined, resolves itself into an accumulation of bubbles, having a somewhat sticky consistency. We had always been told—and still are now very often, though the contrary has been well made out—that these bubbles proceeded from the insect itself, after the manner of any other secretion. But this is not the case. The secretion here is only a clear fluid, and into this the insect afterwards blows bubbles by a mechanical process, and through the addition of air. It is Professor E. S. Morse who, in the pages of _Appleton’s Popular Scientific Monthly_,[35] has thus revolutionised all our ideas on this subject. His account is as follows: “The so-called frog-spittle or cuckoo-spit appears as little flecks of froth on grass, buttercups, and many other plants during the early summer. Immersed in this froth is found a little green insect, sometimes two or three of them concealed by the same moist covering. This little creature