Crossword-Solution: NERVURES 8 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Any small space, bounded by some part different in color or structure, as the spaces bounded by the nervures of the wings of insects, or those by the veins of leaves; an areola.

One of the nervures (a) on the under surface of the former is finely serrated, and is scraped across the prominent nervures on the upper surface of the opposite or right wing.

Hence we may infer with confidence that the Locustidae are descended from a form, in which, as in the existing Achetidae, both wing-covers had serrated nervures on the under surface, and could be indifferently used as the bow; but that in the Locustidae the two wing-covers gradually became differentiated and perfected, on the principle of the division of labour, the one to act exclusively as the bow, and the other as the fiddle.

Walsh also informs me that he has noticed that the female of the Platyphyllum concavum, “when captured makes a feeble grating noise by shuffling her wing-covers together.”) A grating sound thus occasionally and accidentally made by the males, if it served them ever so little as a love-call to the females, might readily have been intensified through sexual selection, by variations in the roughness of the nervures having been continually preserved.

The instrument by which the Tanana produces its music is curiously contrived out of the ordinary nervures of the wing-cases.