XXI 



EXPERIMENTS 295 



cannot, simply because it has not the will to do it. 

 It perishes for lack of the smallest ray of intelli- 

 gence. Yet in this singular intellect it is the fashion 

 nowadays to see a rudiment of human reason ! 

 The fashion will pass and the facts remain, bringing 

 us back to the good old ideas of the soul and its 

 immortal destinies. 



Reaumur relates, too, how his friend Du Hamel, 

 having seized a mason bee with his pincers when it 

 had entered half-way into its cell, head first, to fill it 

 with bee-bread, carried it into a room at a consider- 

 able distance from the spot where he caught it. The 

 bee escaped and flew through the window. Du 

 Hamel immediately returned to the nest. The 

 mason bee reached it almost at the same time, and 

 resumed work. It only seemed a little wilder, says 

 the narrator. 



Why were you not with me, venerated master, 

 on the banks of the Aygues, with their stretches of 

 pebbles, dry for three parts of the year, and an 

 enormous torrent when it rains ? I would have 

 shown you something far better than the fugitive 

 escaped from your pincers. You should have seen, and 

 shared my surprise thereat, not the short flight of a 

 mason bee, which, carried into a room near at hand, 

 escapes and returns straight home in a neighbour- 

 hood familiar to her, but long journeys by unknown 

 ways. You would have seen the bee, carried away 

 by me to a long distance, return with a geographical 

 precision which the swallow would not disown, or 

 the martin, or the carrier-pigeon, and you would 

 have asked yourself, as I did, what inexplicable know- 

 ledge of the map of the country guides this mother 



