ANTS AND SOME OTHER INSECTS. 2Q 



and memory would be inconceivable ! We have just given an ex- 

 ample. I have shown on a former occasion that humble-bees, 

 whose nest I had transferred to my window, when they returned 

 home often confounded other windows of the same fa9ade and ex- 

 amined them for a long time before they discovered the right one. 

 Lubbock reports similar facts. Von Buttel shows that bees that 

 are accustomed to rooms and windows, learn to examine the rooms 

 and windows in other places, i. e., other houses. When Pissot 

 suspended wire netting with meshes twenty-two mm. in diameter 

 in front of a wasp nest, the wasps hesitated at first, then went 

 around the netting by crawling along the ground or avoided it in 

 some other way. But they soon learned to fly directly through the 

 meshes. The sense of sight, observed during flight, is particularly 

 well adapted to experiments of this kind, which cannot therefore 

 be performed with ants. But the latter undoubtedly draw similar 

 inferences from the data derived from their topochemical antennal 

 sense. The discovery of prey or other food on a plant or an ob- 

 ject induces these insects to examine similar plants or objects and 

 to perform other actions of a like nature. 



There are, on the other hand, certain very stupid insects, like 

 the males of ants, the Diptera and may-flies (Ephemerids) with 

 rudimental brains, incapable of learning anything or of combining 

 sense-impressions to any higher degree than as simple automatisms, 

 and without any demonstrable retention of memory-images. Such 

 insects lead a life almost exclusively dominated by sensory stimuli; 

 but their lives are adapted to extremely simple conditions. In 

 these very instances the difference is most striking, and they dem- 

 onstrate most clearly through comparison and contrast the plus 

 possessed by more intelligent insects. 



THE REALM OF WILL. 



The notion of volition, in contradistinction to the notion of 

 reflex action, presupposes the expiration of a certain time interval 

 and the operation of mediating and complex brain-activities be- 

 tween the sense-impression and the movement which it conditions. 

 In the operation of the purposeful automatisms of instinct which 



