Packard.] THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INSECTS. 341 



and other insects, often aiding tlie butelier by flying off with 

 the blow-flies that spoil his meat. Here is a field for the 

 exercise of the wasp's reasoning powers, impelled and guided 

 as they are by her primary parental instincts. It is in the 

 minor doings, the accidents of life, so to speak, that their 

 reasoning powers are brouglit into action. Most of mankind 

 live by their instincts rather than their reason. They labor 

 in the same fashion as their grandfathers, as for instance in 

 farming, men till the ground in the same fashion as their 

 fore-fathers, and when quick-witted persons, those who use 

 their perceptive and reasoning faculties, endeavor to improve 

 upon the customs of the olden time, everybody knows how 

 hard it is to have them changed. Their primitive mode of 

 farming, from becoming habitual, becomes instinctive, and 

 often nothing but the love of money, the selfish principle, 

 stronger in some men than the love of their kind, gets them 

 out of the ruts, when from being q^iasi creatures of a blind 

 instinct, unconscious automata, they with others aid in the 

 advancement of their race. So there are philosophers and 

 reformers who do the thinking for the masses. And some- 

 thing of this kind must go on in the animal world or there 

 never would have been progress upwards in the animal scale. 

 Some new exigency, due to a change in their i)hysical en- 

 vironment, arises, when a new line of action is begun, re- 

 sulting in a new set of habits, new instincts and new species, 

 the physical embodiments of the novel intellectual qualities 

 characterizing the new creations. 



In about a month a brood of workers appear. Thoy at 

 once aid the old queen in building more cells, and now the 

 nests inci'case more i-apidly in size. The material for them 

 is mostly taken by the workers from the bark of trees or the 

 palings of fences, the wasp gnawing them off with her large 

 heavy jaws. In this way the great hornets, within the last 

 ten or fifteen 3'ears in the vicinity of New York, have actu- 

 ally scraped off the bark of lilacs so as to disfigure them. 



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