Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI INSTINCT AND DISCERNMENT Pelopasus1 gives us a very poor idea of her intellect when she plasters up the spot in the wall where the nest which I have removed used to stand, when she persists in cramming her cell with Spiders for the benefit of an egg no longer there and when she dutifully closes a cell which my forceps has left empty, extracting alike germ and provisions. The Mason-bees, the Caterpillar of the Great Peacock Moth and many others, when subjected to similar tests, are guilty of the same illogical behaviour: they continue, in the normal order, their series of industrious actions, though an accident has now rendered them all useless. Just like mill-stones unable to cease revolving though there be no corn left to grind, let them once be given the compelling power and they will continue to perform their task despite its futility. Are they then machines? Far be it from me to think anything so foolish. 'A Mason-wasp forming the subject of essays which have not yet been translated into English.?Translaltr't Note. It is impossible to make definite progress on the shifting sands of contradictory facts: each step in our interpretation may find us embogged. And yet these facts speak so loudly that I do not hesitate to translate their evidence as I understand it. In insect mentality, we have to distinguish two very different domains. One of these is instinct properly so-called, the unconscious impulse that presides over the most wonderful part of what the creature achieves. Where experience and imitation are of absolutely no avail, instinct lays down its inflexible law. It is instinct and instinct alone that makes the mother build for a family which she will never see; that counsels the storing of provisions for the unknown offspring; that directs the sting...