turbance ensued above. The number of performers was the same, the
rhythm the same, the volume the same. The six witnesses were unanimous:
the loud explosion had not modified the song of the Cigales in the
least. The second box gave an identical result.

What are we to conclude from this persistence of the orchestra, its lack
of surprise or alarm at the firing of a charge? Shall we conclude that
the Cigale is deaf? I am not going to venture so far as that; but if any
one bolder than myself were to make the assertion I really do not know
what reasons I could invoke to disprove it. I should at least be forced
to admit that it is very hard of hearing, and that we may well apply to
it the homely and familiar phrase: to shout like a deaf man.

When the blue-winged cricket, basking on the pebbles of some country
footpath, grows deliciously intoxicated with the heat of the sun and
rubs its great posterior thighs against the roughened edge of its
wing-covers; when the green tree-frog swells its throat in the foliage
of the bushes, distending it to form a resonant cavity when the rain is
imminent, is it calling to its absent mate? By no means. The efforts of
the former produce a scarcely perceptible stridulation; the palpitating
throat of the latter is as ineffectual; and the desired one does not
come.

Does the insect really require to emit these resounding effusions, these
vociferous avowals, in order to declare its passion? Consult the immense
majority whom the conjunction of the sexes leaves silent. In the violin
of the grasshopper, the bagpipe of the tree-frog, and the cymbals of the
_Cacan_ I see only their peculiar means of expressing the joy of living,
the universal joy which every species of animal expresses after its
kind.

If you were to tell me that the Cigales play on their noisy instruments
careless of the sound produced, and merely for the pleasure of feeling
themselves alive, just as we rub our hands in a moment of satisfaction,
I should not be particularly shocked. That there is a secondary object
in their conceit, in which the silent sex is interested, is very
possible and very natural, but it is not as yet proven.[1]

CHAPTER IV

THE CIGALE. THE EGGS AND THEIR HATCHING

The Cigale confides its eggs to dry, slender twigs. All the branches
examined by Reaumur which bore such eggs were branches of the mulberry:
a proof that the person entrusted with the search for these eggs in the
neighbourhood of