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Show FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS. The Lift! of the Locust Under Ground. BUT THEY HIVE ONE LONG GAY SEASON. The FemaleB Widowed Early An Unmitigated Un-mitigated Nuisance. i The seventeen year locusts pass sevuu-! sevuu-! teen years underground, and then, as if by preconcerted arrangement, make their appearance out of Utile holes almost al-most simultaneously, and in numbers that run far up into the millions. This 1b always done after sunset, and by fl o'clock the same night the horde have appeared. They are not very active when they first appear out of their sub- ; terranean homes, but they make what speed they can toward the nearest trees, and climb them to the lower leaven, where they fairly swarm, sometimes as many as thirteen puptB clinging to one oak leaf. Those which are beluttd either cling to the bark of the tree or if too late to get that far fasten their claws to the first convenient object, and wait for the grand transformation which is to convert them from ugly crawling things of silence and gloom into gorgeous things of the air and the sunlight, the males endowed with musical powers, and both sexes clad in gay suits of orange and black, with gossamer wings of iridescent hues. But a few minutes elaae-aftar the pupro have secured a resting place before the dull skins begin to crack along the back. Then the imprisoned cicada works his way to freedom, at the first a soft, white thing, but quickly developing wings and becoming hard and active. For the most part it does not require more than twenty twen-ty minutes for the soft prisoner to become be-come a perfect cicada, though sometimes an hour or more is consumed in the process, pro-cess, and several hours are required to produce the final color. The males are the first by several days to appear, and they herald the first dawn of their new existence by trying their drums; for their musical apparatus is in effect drum like. At first their music is rather feeble, but in a little while it secures the proper, tone and force, and then it scarcely knows any rest. Nor do they drum at haphazard, but rather in unison, and bo it is that the noise of the Bwarms can be heard fully a mile away, and is positively positive-ly deafening when close at hand. The male cicada eats very little while waiting for the female to appear, and that little is in the form of sap from the treeB, the bark of which is slightly punctured for tho juice to exude. The coming of the females is hailed by the waiting lords with an increased noise, and for a few days the air is thick with the flying insects, so much bo that the sun is obscured for small areas. In a few days after this the males die gradually, and the females busy themselves with the task of egg laying. Each female will lay in the neighborhood of 600 eggs, I and the manner in which bo lays them , is really remarkable. She selects young twigs only, and, with a singular apparatus, appa-ratus, called an ovipositor, bores holes in regular order along the under Bide of the twigs, into which the eggs are regularly and carefully placed. Each nest contains con-tains about twenty eggs. The ovipositor is a most ingenious contrivance, and is composed of three parts, one part being an awl with which to pierce, and two parts being opposing saws with which to cut. And after the nest has been cut out of the twig the ovipositor acts as a tube, down which the egg is propelled into its placo in the nebt After the cicada has laid all her eggs she loses her strength and dies. She has lived a dreary underground existence of seventeen years, to enjoy a brief life of a few weeks in the air and sunshine. And now the new brood is started on a seventeen years of life. The eggs hatch in about Bix weeks, and the baby cicada is about one-sixteenth of an inch long and very active, though so light that it falls to the ground from a height sometimes of 100 feet without the least injury. It has a pair of Btrong claws with which to dig a hole in the ground, and it puts them into use immediately. Down it goes into tho earth, and for seventeen years burrows and burrows, sometimes going as deep as twenty feet, and sometimes some-times not one-quarter of that, but changing chang-ing its Bkin twenty-five or thirty times during its underground travels. It lives on the juices extracted from roots, and sometimes, but not often, injures trees. When the time for its reappearance on earth comes near again it gradually works its way toward the surface, it finally digs a tunnel upward to the surface, sur-face, going up occasionally to peer about and discover by siis known to itself when tbe 20th of May has come. If the Boil is marshy where it has elected to appear, or if heavy rains are prevailing at the time, it has been known to build a turret six inches above ground, with a roofed cap, bo curved that it can go up into it and be in safety from drowning in case of flood. It is at the time when it emerges from the earth, after its long Bojourn there, that it is in most danger from enemies; for then the hog and j other animals fiud it a toothsome mor- j sel, and devour it in great numbers. At ! a later period, when it has gained the power of flight, it becomes the prey of some birds, though it was reserved for . the little English sparrow to make the most determined and destructive war 1 upon it. So ravenously have the Bpar-rows Bpar-rows been known to devour the insects, that in the height of tbe cicada season a few years oo the air would frequently be full of tbe floating gossamer winga of tho devoured insect. Cor. Harper's Weekly. |