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A small, quick-hatching grub, richly nourished on a dozen eggs, will replace the family of the Cigale. The experience of centuries has taught the Cigale nothing. With her excellent eyesight she must be able to perceive these terrible sappers as they hover about her, meditating their crime.
We will consider the eggs of the common Cigale to the exclusion of the others, as their history is the history of all. September is not yet over when the shining white as of ivory gives way to the yellow hue of cheese. During the first days of October you may see, at the forward end of the egg, two tiny points of chestnut brown, which are the eyes of the embryo in formation.
If the weather is calm and hot, towards mid-day the song of the Cigale is divided into strophes of several seconds' duration, which are separated by brief intervals of silence. The strophe begins suddenly.
The first operation performed by the Cigale consists in making a series of slight lacerations, such as one might make with the point of a pin, which, if plunged obliquely downwards into the twig, would tear the woody fibres and would compress them so as to form a slight protuberance.
With a paper cone corresponding to the pitch of the note, with its large end held in the mouth of a test-tube acting as a resonator, we have no longer the cry of the Cigale, but almost the bellowing of a bull. My little children, coming up to me by chance at the moment of this acoustic experiment, fled in terror.
The first enters and raises a little rubbish-heap at the threshold of her burrow; the second emerges, and cannot, while working, pile up its rubbish on a threshold which as yet has no existence. The burrow of the Cigale descends about fifteen inches.
The total number of chambers varying from thirty to forty, it follows that the Cigale lays from three to four hundred eggs. Réaumur arrived at the same figures from an examination of the ovaries. This is truly a fine family, capable by sheer force of numbers of surviving the most serious dangers.
If, more enthusiastic in each generation, it could acquire, in the course of progress, a ventral resonator comparable to my paper trumpets, the South of France would sooner or later become uninhabitable, and the Cacan would have Provence to itself. After the details already given concerning the common Cigale it is hardly needful to tell you how the insupportable Cacan can be reduced to silence.
Everything seems to prove that the burrow of the Cigale is a waiting-room, a meteorological station, in which the larva makes a prolonged stay; sometimes hoisting itself to the neighbourhood of the surface in order to ascertain the external climate; sometimes retiring to the depths the better to shelter itself.
The attack was delivered high up above my head, in the early morning, while the Cigale was resting; and the struggles of the unfortunate creature as it was dissected alive had resulted in the fall of assailant and assailed together. Since then I have often been the witness of similar assassinations.
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