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Updated: June 4, 2025
The sound is produced by the extremity of the abdomen, which gently rises and falls, rubbing, as it does so, with its last few segments, the hinder edge of the wing-covers, which are held firm and motionless. There is no special equipment on the rubbing surface nor on the surface rubbed.
But it is conceivable that the now utterly lost branchiae might have been gradually worked in by natural selection for some quite distinct purpose: in the same manner as, on the view entertained by some naturalists that the branchiae and dorsal scales of Annelids are homologous with the wings and wing-covers of insects, it is probable that organs which at a very ancient period served for respiration have been actually converted into organs of flight.
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?
Scientists tell us that crickets, grasshoppers, locusts and the like are fiddlers. Their hind legs are their fiddle-bows, and by drawing these briskly up and down the projecting veins of their wing-covers they produce the sounds that characterize them. Was it in imitation of these small winged creatures that man first experimented with the friction of bow and strings as a means of making music?
The wing-covers, as we have seen, are prolonged in a deep fold over each flank. These folds are the dampers, which, as they are pressed downwards or slightly raised, modify the intensity of the sound, and according to the extent of their contact with the soft abdomen now muffle the song to a mezza voce and now let it sound fortissimo.
Hence we may infer with confidence that the Locustidae are descended from a form, in which, as in the existing Achetidae, both wing-covers had serrated nervures on the under surface, and could be indifferently used as the bow; but that in the Locustidae the two wing-covers gradually became differentiated and perfected, on the principle of the division of labour, the one to act exclusively as the bow, and the other as the fiddle.
This arrangement is the reverse of that exhibited by the green grasshopper, the Decticus, the Ephippigera, and their relations. The Cricket is right-handed, the others left-handed. The two wing-covers have the same structure. To know one is to know the other. Let us examine that on the right hand.
We are all familiar with what we call "worm-eaten" wood, with canals that have been eaten by these borers running through it in all directions. This completely ruins some of the best forest trees for lumber, and makes one of the greatest losses of the forests. Beetles are insects in the adult state. They have hard, shiny wing-covers.
Let a great grasshopper chance to come by: the Mantis follows it with its glance, glides between the leaves, and suddenly rises up before it; "and then assumes its spectral pose, which terrifies and fascinates the prey; the wing-covers open, the wings spring to their full width, forming a vast pyramid which dominates the back; a sort of swishing sound is heard, like the hiss of a startled adder; the murderous fore-limbs open to their full extent, forming a cross with the body, and exhibiting the axillae ornamented with eyes vaguely resembling those of the peacock's tail, part of the panoply of war, concealed upon ordinary occasions.
On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility, such as the teeth in the embryonic calf or the shrivelled wings under the soldered wing-covers of many beetles, should so frequently occur.
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