INSTINCT IN INSECTS. 15 



those in which instinct is most developed; we except neither birds with 

 their nests, nor beavers with their dams. Among insects, those in 

 which the highest expression of instinct is noted are bees, that build 

 cells like the work of profound geometry ; and particularly ants, acting 

 with instincts yet higher, which seem to approach those perhaps 

 smothered by education in man. A Genevese, Peter Huber, -made 

 these known to lis. His book (1810) crowns a period of remarkable 

 studies upon insects. Before his time, as far back as 1705, a woman, 

 Mile. Sybille de Merian, crossed the ocean and made a voyage to 

 Surinam, to paint the caterpillars of the tropics ; then after her come 

 Reaumur, Da Geer, Bonnet, who watches night and day his flea, the 

 daughter of five virgin generations, and, when it dies, writes to all 

 Europe to disclaim any responsibility for the event. The pursuit 

 grows a passion. Lyonnet passes his life in describing, drawing, and 

 engraving the anatomy of the willow-caterpillar. Enthusiasm works 

 miracles ; Francis Huber, the father of the man of ants, although blind, 

 performs the marvel of making wonderful discoveries as to things tak- 

 ing place in the inner darkness of beehives. Peter Huber, the son, is 

 lost and absorbed in those societies of the ants to which he devotes 

 his studies. While all Europe is agitated by coalitions, nothing from 

 without reaches him. 



Peter Huber observes and experiments with rare sagacity. No 

 fact escapes him ; he may remark upon it or explain it ill, but he notes 

 it most accurately. His observations have not been contradicted ; his 

 experiments still remain patterns of care and patience. He peopled 

 with ants, his garden, the terrace of his house, his study, his tables, 

 which were turned into a kind of hives, and, lest this new dwelling 

 might be unsatisfactory to the ants, and in order that they might keep 

 at work in it, he made rain and fair weather for them ; his rain-making 

 consisting in rubbing his hand for hours at a time over a wet brush. 

 In brief, he supplied them so richly with tempting dainties and weath- 

 er-contrivances, that at last they wanted nothing better than their 

 chance home, a bureau-drawer. Did he not even one day cherish the 

 fantastic notion of bringing up the larvas of his ants by feeding . by 

 hand ? We cannot resist loving him for his attachment to these little, 

 thinking beings. He meditated long over one decisive experiment 

 nothing less than the question of setting two colonies of ants at war 

 on the floor of his study. He hesitated and lingered to awake the 

 casus belli which should be the signal of slaughter ; he devised pre- 

 texts to adjourn the dreadful scene. " I thought over this experiment 

 for a long time," he says, " and I constantly postponed it, because I 

 had grown to be very fond of my captives." This recalls one of 

 Reaumur's sayings. He observes with what celerity humble-bees re- 

 build their nest of moss after it has been opened to examine the in- 

 side, an intrusion which these insects allow much more patiently than 

 honey-bees do, and he adds : " If the moss from above is thrown down 



