arance:
Zonites and Chryses (Chrysis flammea), of whom the first are consumers
of provisions and the second of grubs.

This lamentable ending of the Resin-bee, buried alive under the Osmia's
walls, is not a rare accident to be passed over in silence or mentioned
in a few words; on the contrary, it happens very often; and its
frequency suggests this thought: the school which sees in instinct an
acquired habit treats the slightest favourable occurrence in the course
of animal industry as the starting-point of an improvement which,
transmitted by heredity and becoming in time more and more accentuated,
at last grows into a settled characteristic common to the whole race.
There is, it is true, a total absence of positive proofs in support of
this theory; but it is stated with a wealth of hypothesis that leaves
a thousand loopholes: 'Granting that...Supposing that...It may
be...nothing need prevent us from believing... It is quite possible...'
Thus argued the master; and the disciples have not yet hit upon anything
better.

'If the sky were to fall,' said Rabelais, 'the larks would all be
caught.'

Yes, but the sky stays up; and the larks go on flying.

'If things happened in such and such a way,' says our friend, 'instinct
may have undergone variations and modifications.'

Yes, but are you quite sure that things happened as you say?

I banish the word 'if' from my vocabulary. I suppose nothing, I take
nothing for granted; I pluck the brutal fact, the only thing that can be
trusted; I record it and then ask myself what conclusion rests upon
its solid framework. From the fact which I have related we may draw the
following inference:

'You say that any modification profitable to the animal is transmitted
throughout a series of favoured ones who, better equipped with tools,
better endowed with aptitudes, abandon the ancient usages and replace
the primitive species, the victim of the struggle for life. You declare
that once, in the dim distance of the ages, a Bee found herself by
accident in possession of a dead Snail-shell. The safe and peaceful
lodging pleased her fancy. On and on went the hereditary liking; and the
Snail-shell proved more and more agreeable to the insect's descendants,
who began to look for it under the stones, so that later generations,
with the aid of habit, ended by adopting it as the ancestral dwelling.
Again by accident, the Bee happened upon a drop of resin. It was soft,
plastic, well-suited fo