the Wasp, while in quest of her lost prey, happens to walk over this
leaf, to pass it again and again without suspecting that the Spider lies
beneath, for she goes and continues her vain search farther off.
Her guide, therefore is not scent, but sight. Nevertheless, she is
constantly feeling the ground with her antennae. What can be the
function of those organs? I do not know, although I assert that they
are not olfactory organs. The Ammophila, in search of her Grey Worm, had
already led me to make the same assertion; I now obtain an experimental
proof which seems to me decisive. I would add that the Pompilus has very
short sight: often she passes within a couple of inches of her Spider
without seeing her.

CHAPTER 7. SOME REFLECTIONS UPON INSECT PSYCHOLOGY.

The laudator temperis acti is out of favour just now: the world is on
the move. Yes, but sometimes it moves backwards. When I was a boy, our
twopenny textbooks told us that man was a reasoning animal; nowadays,
there are learned volumes to prove to us that human reason is but a
higher rung in the ladder whose foot reaches down to the bottommost
depths of animal life. There is the greater and the lesser; there are
all the intermediary rounds; but nowhere does it break off and start
afresh. It begins with zero in the glair of a cell and ascends until we
come to the mighty brain of a Newton. The noble faculty of which we were
so proud is a zoological attribute. All have a larger or smaller share
of it, from the live atom to the anthropoid ape, that hideous caricature
of man.

It always struck me that those who held this levelling theory made facts
say more than they really meant; it struck me that, in order to obtain
their plain, they were lowering the mountain-peak, man, and elevating
the valley, the animal. Now this levelling of theirs needed proofs,
to my mind; and, as I found none in their books, or at any rate only
doubtful and highly debatable ones, I did my own observing, in order to
arrive at a definite conviction; I sought; I experimented.

To speak with any certainty, it behoves us not to go beyond what
we really know. I am beginning to have a passable acquaintance with
insects, after spending some forty years in their company. Let us
question the insect, then: not the first that comes along, but the most
gifted, the Hymenopteron. I am giving my opponents every advantage.
Where will they find a creature more richly endowed with talent? It
would seem