the actual food of each species, having eaten everything and
found it grateful to the stomach, you would now, from first to last, be
unprejudiced consumers, omnivorous progressives. I prefer to believe, in
short, that the theory of evolution is powerless to explain your diet.
This is the conclusion drawn from the dining-room installed in my old
sardine-box.

CHAPTER 9. RATIONING ACCORDING TO SEX.

Considered in respect of quality, the food has just disclosed our
profound ignorance of the origins of instinct. Success falls to the
blusterers, to the imperturbable dogmatists, from whom anything is
accepted if only they make a little noise. Let us discard this bad habit
and admit that really, if we go to the bottom of things, we know nothing
about anything. Scientifically speaking, nature is a riddle to
which human curiosity finds no definite solution. Hypothesis follows
hypothesis; the theoretical rubbish-heap grows bigger and bigger; and
still truth escapes us. To know how to know nothing might well be the
last word of wisdom.

Considered in respect of quantity, the food sets us other problems, no
less obscure. Those of us who devote ourselves assiduously to studying
the customs of the game-hunting Wasps soon find our attention arrested
by a very remarkable fact, at the time when our mind, refusing to be
satisfied with sweeping generalities, which our indolence too readily
makes shift with, seeks to enter as far as possible into the secret of
the details, so curious and sometimes so important, as and when they
become better-known to us. This fact, which has preoccupied me for many
a long year, is the variable quantity of the provisions packed into the
burrow as food for the larva.

Each species is scrupulously faithful to the diet of its ancestors. For
more than a quarter of a century I have been exploring my district; and
I have never known the diet to vary. To-day, as thirty years ago, each
huntress must have the game which I first saw her pursuing. But, though
the nature of the victuals is constant, the quantity is not so. In
this respect the difference is so great that he would need to be a
very superficial observer who should fail to perceive it on his first
examination of the burrows. In the beginning, this difference, involving
two, three, four times the quantity and more, perplexed me extremely and
led me to the conclusions which I reject to-day.

Here, among the instances most familiar to me, are some e