Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

I wonder if the summer insects, such as the leaf-cricket and the green grig and grasshopper, with their stinging music, did not first suggest to some one the thought of inventing a stringed instrument; we are all acquainted with the myth of how the lyre came to be fashioned by Mercury out of the shell of a tortoise, but no one, so far as I am aware, has told us how the other stringed instruments used by the ancients came to be invented. Perhaps it was a grasshopper that suggested to the Parthians the making of the sambuca, a musical instrument of four strings; and the cricket that suggested the magadis and pectis, both

played without a plectrum. Terpander, although they say he invented the barbitos to correspond to, and answer the pectis in use among the Lydians, may have got his idea from a long-legged grig or leaf-cricket singing merrily in the summer grass by some Arcadian stream.