Grasshopper Dear... Evolution and Ecology Essays

I.V. Stebaev

Grasshopper dear, oh, how blissful must it be… This line belongs to the scholar and poet who separated the Literary Russian language from the Church Slavonic one and whom Aleksandr Pushkin called “our first university”, Mikhailo V. Lomonosov. The verse about the grasshopper was composed during one of his trips from St Petersburg to Petergoff (a summer residence of Russian tsars), where Lomonosov would go for an audience with the daughter of Peter the Great to entreat with her of the privileges of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The scholar’s carriage was damaged and, while it was being repaired, the naturalist whiled away the time on a forest meadow grown with very high grass. It was a sultry summer day in August 1761, and the meadow brimmed over with the buzzing, chirping and singing of grasshoppers and other similar music-making creatures.
Possibly, the main performer in the concerto the meadow played for Lomonosov was the genuine grasshopper whose sonorous Latin name is Tettigonia cantans, or song-grasshopper. This grasshopper, common in our moderate climate, comes to life in spring from an egg laid in the ground...

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