Page:Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn.djvu/394

Rh young, their food is triturated and spread for them upon a smooth piece of wood; but the adults are usually furnished with unprepared food,—consisting of pairings of egg-plant, melon-rind, cucumber-rind, or the soft interior parts of the white onion. Some insects, however, are specially nourished;—the abura-kirigirisu, for example, being fed with sugar-water and slices of musk-melon.

All the insects mentioned in the Tōkyō price-list are not of equal interest; and several of the names appear to refer only to different varieties of one species,—though on this point I am not positive. Some of the insects do not seem to have yet been scientifically classed; and I am no entomologist. But I can offer some general notes on the more important among the little melodists, and free translations of a few out of the countless poems about them,—beginning with the matsu-mushi, which was celebrated in Japanese verse a thousand years ago:

As ideographically written, the name of this 註