With reference to my remarks in these notes of September 19 upon the nightly concert of the crickets taking place just now in my garden, I should have liked, had space permitted, to have said a good deal more about these interesting insects. They have a very special human interest, although of no particular economic importance to man, For, as is well known, the Chinese are very fond of these insects, which they keep as pets in special receptacles, usually the hollowed-out and artistically decorated shells of certain kinds of gourds, either for the sake of their songs or for the sport of cricket-fighting, They recognize many species besides the house cricket and the field cricket of the family GTyllidae, It is one of the varieties of the feld cricket that they use for fighting, All the others are kept to delight the ear with their cheerful songs. Most of the old-fashioned Chinese of the bourgeois class, that is to say, shopkeepers, merchants and the like, as well as many of the scholar class or literati, were in the habit of keeping crickets in these gourds tucked away in the folds of their garments, voluminous sleeves or sashlike girdles, feeding and caring for the little insects with tender solicitude, and miraculously keeping them alive and happy all through the cold winter months, which is when they usually die in their natural state, Other Chinese, notably of the farmer class, even now in the changing China that we know, keep the much larger singing grasshoppers of the family Locustidae in little bamboo cages, like birds, This family also includes the katydids and other sound-producing grasshoppers, but not the true locusts as one might have thought. It may be mentioned, in this connection, that a great deal of confusion has existed in regard to the nomenclature, scientific and popular, of the grasshoppers and locusts, It is now universally agreed amongst zoologists that the locusts do not belong to the Locustidae, but to the family Acrididae, in which the species have comparatively short antennae, and which includes many insects commonly called grasshoppers, Some of these make a fairly loud rustling noise by rubbing their long hind legs up and down against the edges of their long wings, The members of the Locustidae all have very long slender antennae, while their long hind legs are proportionately much longer and more slender than those of the true locusts or the true crickets, Their wings may be long and broad or extremely short, Many of them have powerful jaws and can bite severely, In my garden I have noted several species of true crickets, at least half a dozen different kinds of katydids, with their excessively long legs and antennae and their Jong leaf-like wings, and one or two of the larger and heavier short-winged grasshoppers which the Chinese keep in cages. And all of them—crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, call them what you will—at this time of year give full vent to their love expression, resulting in the wonderful concerts that nightly regale my ears. I have to pay for this pleasure in the way of eaten flowers and leaves in my garden, for these insect-musicians are voracious feeders, but what would you? No one can have everything in this life, which, I ind, is mainly a matter of compromise or give and take.—A, DE C. S.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.