230 THE SOLITARY WASPS. 



ter otherwise. I imagine that as the days went by there had 

 been formed in the mind of the spider a determinate association 

 on the one hand between free entry into the cage and the 

 pleasurable feeling attending satisfaction of the nutritive in- 

 stinct, and on the other between the closed slide and the un- 

 pleasant feeling of hunger and inhibited impulse. Now in her 

 free life the spider had always employed her web in the service 

 of the nutritive impulse. Association had therefore grown up 

 between definite positions of her web and definite peculiarities 

 of the objects to Avhich it was attached, as well as changes which 

 it produced in the positions of certain of these objects, — leaves, 

 small twigs, etc. The impression of the falling slide, that is, 

 called up by association the idea of other objects similarly 

 moved wdiich had been held in their place by threads properly 

 spur.; and finally there were connected with this association the 

 other two of pleasure and raising, unpleasantness and closing, 

 of the door. That was surely enough to rouse the prisoner to 

 action. Any other intellectual or inventive activity is entirely 

 unnecessary. If she had not had these associations at her dis- 

 posal, she would certainly never have hit upon the plan she did." 

 Had Wundt been familiar with the habits of spiders he would 

 have known that whenever they are confined they walk around 

 and around the cage leaving behind them lines of web. Of 

 course many lines passed under his little sliding door and when 

 he came to close it there was a slight resistance. These are the 

 facts. His inference that there was even the remotest inten- 

 tion on the part of his prisoner, to hinder the movement of the 

 door is entirely gratuitous. Even the simpler mental states that 

 are supposed to have passed through the mind of the spider were 

 the product of Wundt's own imagination.* He does not, liow- 



*This quotation from Wundt furnishes a good example of the futility 

 of any attempt to understand the meaning of the actions of animals until 

 one has become well acquainted with their life habits. When Froude, in 

 his "Cat's Pilgrimage," makes the bee urge upon all animals that it is 

 their plain duty to make honey, while the cow expresses a pained surprise 

 that many insects neglect to furnish milk, we see how a wider knowledge 

 on their part would have prevented much misunderstanding. 



