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Updated: May 15, 2025
Very often as the Cigale is absorbed in her maternal task a diminutive fly, also full of eggs, busily exterminates the Cigale's eggs as fast as they are laid. This insect was known to Réaumur. In nearly all the twigs examined he found its grub, the cause of a misunderstanding at the beginning of his researches. But he did not, could not see the audacious insect at work.
I have seen them nibbling the ends of the Cigale's claws; I have caught them tugging the ends of her wings, climbing on her back, tickling her antennæ. One audacious individual so far forgot himself under my eyes as to seize her proboscis, endeavouring to extract it from the well! Thus hustled by these dwarfs, and at the end of her patience, the giantess finally abandons the well.
For there are many thirsty creatures wandering hither and thither; and at last they discover the Cigale's private well, betrayed by the oozing sap upon the brink. They gather round it, at first with a certain amount of constraint, confining themselves to lapping the extravasated liquor.
The sound is not musical, for when it is not a continuous scissor-grinding noise, it is like the cry of a corncrake with a weak throat; but what delight there is in it! and how it expresses that joy in the present and recklessness of the morrow, which the fabulist has in vain contrasted with the virtuous industry of the ant in order to point a moral for mankind! vainly, because the cigale's short life in the sunlit trees will ever seem to men a more ideal one than that of the earth-burrowing ant, with its possible longevity, its peevish parsimony, and restless anxiety for the future.
By means of its terminal thread each sounds its cymbal, by depressing it and immediately releasing it, when its own elasticity makes it spring back into shape. These two vibrating scales are the source of the Cigale's cry. Do you wish to convince yourself of the efficiency of this mechanism? Take a Cigale but newly dead and make it sing. Nothing is simpler.
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