ged, though the total thickness
of wall is really the same. Once outside its earthen abode, the insect
has done all that it was destined to do in order to release itself; to
move freely on the mortar dome represents to it the end of the release,
the end of the act of boring. Around the nest a new barrier appears,
the wall made by the paper bag; but, in order to pierce this, the insect
would have to repeat the act which it has just accomplished, the act
which it is not intended to perform more than once in its life; it
would, in short, have to make into a double act that which by nature is
a single one; and the insect cannot do this, for the sole reason that
it has not the wish to. The Mason-bee perishes for lack of the smallest
gleam of intelligence. And this is the singular intellect in which it
is the fashion nowadays to see a germ of human reason! The fashion will
pass and the facts remain, bringing us back to the good old notions of
the soul and its immortal destinies.

Reaumur tells us how his friend Duhamel, having seized a Mason-bee with
a forceps when she had half entered the cell, head foremost, to fill
it with pollen-paste, carried her to a closet at some distance from the
spot where he captured her. The Bee got away from him in this closet
and flew out through the window. Duhamel made straight for the nest. The
Mason arrived almost as soon as he did and renewed her work. She only
seemed a little wilder, says the narrator, in conclusion.

Why were you not here with me, revered master, on the banks of the
Aygues, which is a vast expanse of pebbles for three-fourths of the year
and a mighty torrent when it rains? I should have shown you something
infinitely better than the fugitive escaping from the forceps. You would
have witnessed--and in so doing, would have shared my surprise--not the
brief flight of the Mason who, carried to the nearest room,
releases herself and forthwith returns to her nest in that familiar
neighbourhood, but long journeys through unknown country. You would have
seen the Bee whom I carried to a great distance from her home, to quite
unfamiliar ground, find her way back with a geographical sense of which
the Swallow, the Martin and the Carrier-pigeon would not have
been ashamed; and you would have asked yourself, as I did, what
incomprehensible knowledge of the local map guides that mother seeking
her nest.

To come to facts: it is a matter of repeating with the Mason-bee of the
Walls m