Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/58

48 expanded into the full proportions of the insect's wings, whose tips extend beyond the end of the body. It is a pretty sight, this rapid growth of the beautiful wings of a freshly emerged cicada. As the wings expand, the body diminishes, and soon assumes its normal size.

Now follows another period of rest, but the insect has completed its form. It has attained the perfect stature of what is known as the "imago." By and by it is able to stretch its new-found wings and fly into the tree tops.

In a little while the air is filled with music. The cicada-lover is serenading his sweetheart, and he woos his mate to his side by sounding the little drums with which he is provided. These are slight cavities, placed underneath the forepart of the body, and covered with a membrane something after the manner of a drumhead. The rapid tightening and contracting of this membrane is supposed to produce the male cicada's call. The females are without drums, and are therefore silent listeners to the male orchestra. An ancient Grecian poet has alluded to this in his ungallant lines,

The male cicadas spend a few weeks flitting from bough to bough and rolling their mimic drums to summon their lady-loves to their sides. Then their lives are ended. But the mother cicadas have serious work to do before their death. They must provide for another brood. Nature has endowed the female with an instrument known as a "piercer," which has the power and does the work both of an awl and of a double-edged saw, or rather of two keyhole saws cutting opposite to each other. With this instrument she cuts for an egg-trench a little V-shaped slit through the bark into the fibre of a twig, or the tender tip of a larger branch. Within this she deposits a certain number of eggs. Then she moves farther along the branch, saws another slit, and again oviposits. Thus she continues until she has exhausted her store of four or five hundred eggs. At length, weakened by her labors, she falters and falls and soon dies. Like a good mother, her last care is for her offspring, whom, however, she is never to see. A month or six weeks of sunlight and song, of happy courtship, of busy maternal duty,—this is the sum of the cicada's mature life after its long subterranean career.

We now follow the life of the little ones. Twigs within which female cicadas have oviposited generally die. Forests thus infested present the appearance, along the tops and sides of trees, of having been blighted by frost. The leaves die, giving a ragged and sorry aspect to the trees which otherwise are uninjured. This is about all the harm that cicadas do after emergence. It is only when tender young trees are assault-