front of each chapel.  Two thick muscular pillars are visible, of a pale orange colour; they join at an angle, forming a V, of which the point lies on the median line of the insect, against the lower face of the thorax.  Each of these pillars of flesh terminates suddenly at its upper extremity, as though cut short, and from the truncated portion rises a short, slender tendon, which is attached laterally to the corresponding cymbal.

There is the whole mechanism, no less simple than that of the steel “cricket.”  The two muscular columns contract and relax, shorten and lengthen.  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.  Seize one of these muscular columns with the forceps and pull it in a series of careful jerks.  The extinct cri-cri comes to life again; at each jerk there is a clash of the cymbal.  The sound is feeble, to be sure, deprived of the amplitude which the living performer is able to give it by means of his resonating chambers; none the less, the fundamental element of the song is produced by this anatomist’s trick.

Would you, on the other hand, silence a living Cigale?—­that obstinate melomaniac, who, seized in the fingers, deplores his misfortune as loquaciously as ever he sang the joys of freedom in his tree?  It is useless to violate his chapels, to break his mirrors; the atrocious mutilation would not quiet him.  But introduce a needle by the lateral aperture which we have named the “window” and prick the cymbal at the bottom of the sound-box.  A little touch and the perforated cymbal is silent.  A similar operation on the other side of the insect and the insect is dumb, though otherwise as vigorous as before and without any perceptible wound.  Any one not in the secret would be amazed at the result of my pin-prick, when the destruction of the mirrors and the other dependencies of the “church” do not cause silence.  A tiny perforation of no importance to the insect is more effectual than evisceration.

The dampers, which are rigid and solidly built, are motionless.  It is the abdomen itself which, by rising and falling, opens or closes the doors of the “church.”  When the abdomen is lowered the dampers exactly cover the chapels as well as the windows of the sound-boxes.  The sound is then muted, muffled, diminished.  When the abdomen rises the chapels are open, the windows unobstructed, and the sound acquires its full volume.  The rapid oscillations of the abdomen, synchronising with the contractions of the motor muscles of the cymbals, determine the changing volume of the sound, which seems to be caused by rapidly repeated strokes of a fiddlestick.