Part II Chapter 2 Doctor Dolittle's Garden by Hugh Lofting
FOREIGN INSECTS
For my part, I cannot truthfully say that I ever got into real, personal, conversational contact with the Insect World. But that John Dolittle did there can be no doubt whatever. This I have proof of from things that happened. You cannot make a wasp stand up on its front legs and wave its other four feet in the air unless you know enough wasp language to make him do so. And that—and a great deal more—I have seen the Doctor accomplish.
Of course it was never quite the free and easy exchange of ideas that his talking with the larger animals had come to be. But then insects' ideas are different; and consequently their languages for conveying those ideas are different. With all but the very largest insects the "listening," as it was called, was done with these quite complicated and very delicate instruments.
All draughts and vibrations had to be carefully shut off. Later on Bumpo and I made a second building specially for this, with a floor so solid that no footfall or shock, no matter how heavy, could jar the apparatus. It was also equipped with a very fine system for heating the atmosphere to exactly the right temperature. For the Doctor had found that most insects are inclined to go to sleep immediately the temperature falls below what is for them the normal climate of their active season. As a general rule, the hotter it was the more lively they were and the more they talked. But of course the air could not be allowed to get much warmer than full summer heat.
We called it listening for convenience. As a matter of fact, it more often consisted of recording vibrations, the pitch of a buzz, the velocity of the wing stroke and other slight noises and motions which insects make. With some of the very largest ones it was possible to hear the sounds given out with the naked ear. The clearest results that John Dolittle obtained were with imported insects, such as locusts and cicadas of different kinds. How he procured these foreign specimens was rather interesting. He asked several birds to make special trips abroad for him and to bring back the grubs and eggs of grasshoppers, crickets, etc. For this of course he employed insect-eating birds who would know where to look for the specimens and could recognize them when they found them. Then in his incubating boxes at home he hatched out the eggs and grubs into the full-grown insects.
Most of the information that the Doctor gathered from this new study of insect languages was concerned with the natural history of the various species and genera. With this I filled over sixty thick notebooks for him. But we learned from certain cases, with which he was able to get into closer touch, many interesting personal stories of insect life and society. These, I think, might be more entertaining to the general reader than the purely scientific material which we gathered and stored away during the seven or eight months we spent on this work. We found that several kinds of butterflies had considerable imagination; and some of the yarns we were told I strongly suspect were made up out of whole cloth for our amusement. Others sounded as though they had the ring of truth to them. However I will shortly narrate one or two and then you can judge for yourselves.
All of the Dolittle household, with the exception of the harassed Dab-Dab, were greatly interested in this new departure of the Doctor's. And as soon as I had got a new section written into my note-books we were at once besieged by Chee-Chee or Polynesia or Too-Too or Gub-Gub to read it out loud. And that is how most of the following anecdotes came to be told round the kitchen fire in the manner of the good old days when the Doctor had amused his family every night with a fireside yarn.