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In two families of the Homoptera and in three of the Orthoptera, the males alone possess sound-producing organs in an efficient state. These are used incessantly during the breeding-season, not only for calling the females, but apparently for charming or exciting them in rivalry with other males.

By this means many, and it seems to me valid reasons may be brought up in favour of the opinion that the most ancient Insects approached more nearly to the existing Orthoptera, and perhaps to the wingless Blattidae, than to any other order, and that the "complete metamorphosis" of the Beetles, Lepidoptera, etc., is of later origin.

To my own knowledge, my part of the country possesses five species, one and all addicted to a diet of Orthoptera. I surprise her from time to time working on the hard roadside banks and the trodden edges of the footpaths. There, to a depth of an inch at most, she digs her burrows, each isolated from the rest. The captive of the one would not be despised by the other.

I prefer to take my subjects from among the Orthoptera, which, owing to their imposing size and the thinness of their skin at the points to be attacked, lend themselves better than other insects to my delicate manipulations.

Then without expressing his views as to the position and affinities of the Lepismidæ, he remarks "as the upshot of all this, then, while the Collembola are clearly more nearly allied to the Insecta than to the Crustacea or Arachnida, we cannot, I think, regard them as Orthoptera or Neuroptera, or even as true insects.

The generality of this fact is quite remarkable: it holds good with almost all mammals, birds, amphibians, and fishes; also with many crustaceans, spiders, and some few insects, such as certain orthoptera and libellulae.

If we admit that the females of the Homoptera and Orthoptera appreciate the musical tones of their male partners, and that the various instruments have been perfected through sexual selection, there is little improbability in the females of other insects appreciating beauty in form or colour, and consequently in such characters having been thus gained by the males.

They send me all sorts of trumpery, he said, Orthoptera and Lepidoptera; as if a coleopterist a scarabeeist cared for such things. This business is no boy's play to me. The insect population of the world is not even catalogued yet, and a lifetime given to the scarabees is a small contribution enough to their study.

The Locusts, the Crickets, and the Scolopendrae are the last representatives of a very ancient world, of an extinct fauna, of an early creation, whose perverse and unbridled instincts were given free vent, when creation was as yet but dimly outlined, "still making the earliest essays of its organizing forces"; when the primitive Orthoptera, "the obscure forebears of those of to-day, were "sowing the wild oats of a frantic rut, "in the colossal forests of the secondary period; by the borders of the vast lakes, full of crocodiles, and antediluvian marshes, which in Provence were shaded by palms, and strange ferns, and giant Lycopodia, never as yet enlivened by the song of a bird.

Before considering the changes from the mandibulate form of insects to those with mouth parts adapted for piercing and sucking, we must endeavor to learn how far it was possible for the caterpillar or maggot to become evolved from the Leptus-like larvæ of the Neuroptera, Orthoptera, Hemiptera and most Coleoptera.