THE PLASTIC BEHAl'lOR OF ANTS. 541 



conscious of the fact that the cutting of leaves is not sufficient, but that 

 a portion of the fungus mass itself is necessary for the growth of the 

 fungus garden." And yet a critical examination of the facts since 

 brought to light by J. Huber and related in Chapter XVIII, shows 

 that only typical instincts are manifested. The queen feeds on fungus 

 hyphae before leaving the nest for her nuptial flight, and as this food 

 is solid, it is packed into the hypopharyngeal pocket, which also receives 

 the dirt scraped from her body by her strigils. The pellet thus formed 

 is not expelled till she has excavated her cell in the ground. Then it 

 is cast out like the hypopharyngeal pellets of other ants. It contains 

 enough extraneous substance to cause the hyphae to proliferate and the 

 presence of these evidently stimulates the ant to attend to their culti- 

 vation and to manure them with the only substance at her disposal, 

 namely, her feces. There is no point in this series of activities where 

 it is necessary to postulate a process of reasoning on the part of the 

 insect. The saving of portions of the fungus garden by the workers 

 when the nest is inundated is also quite as instinctive as the rescuing 

 of the larva? and pupae by these and other insects under the same 

 circumstances. 



Here belongs also the following case of a wasp described by Erasmus 

 Darwin ("Zoonomia," I, p. 183): "One circumstance I shall relate 

 which fell under my own eye and showed the power of reason in a 

 wasp, as it is exercised among men. A wasp on a gravel walk had 

 caught a fly nearly as large as himself ; kneeling on the ground I 

 observed him separate the tail and the head from the body part, to 

 which the wings were attached. He then took the body part in his 

 paws, and rose about two feet from the ground with it ; but a gentle 

 breeze wafting the wings of the fly turned him around in the air, and 

 he settled again with his prey upon the gravel. I then distinctly 

 observed him cut off with his mouth, first one of the wings, and then 

 the other, after which he flew away with it unmolested by the wind. 

 Go, thou sluggard, learn arts and industry from the bee, and from the 

 ant ! Go, proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister ! ' ; Some knowl- 

 edge of the ways of wasps would have taught Erasmus Darwin that 

 they instinctively cut off the legs, wings, head, etc., of their insect prey 

 before carrying the more nutritious portion of it to their young, and 

 that they perform, these activities with machine-like regularity whether 

 the wind happens to be blowing or not. This case may be regarded 

 as- the type of a large number of ant. bee and wasp stories. The 

 recorded facts are often perfectly accurate, but the inferences are false 

 and misleading, owing to ignorance or insufficient knowledge of the 

 normal behavior of the animals under consideration. 



