CHAPTER VII 



SOME REFLECTIONS UPON INSECT PSY- 

 CHOLOGY 



THE laudator tempor'is acti is out of fa- 

 vour just now: the world Is on the 

 move. Yes, but sometimes it moves back- 

 wards. When I was a boy, our twopenny 

 textbooks told us that man was a reasoning 

 animal; nowadays, there are learned volumes 

 to prove to us that human reason is but a 

 higher rung in the ladder whose foot reaches 

 down to the bottommost depths of animal 

 life. There is the greater and the lesser; 

 there are all the intermediary rounds; but no- 

 where does it break off and start afresh. It 

 begins with zero in the glair of a cell and 

 ascends until we come to the mighty brain of 

 a Newton. The noble faculty of which we 

 were so proud is a zoological attribute. All 

 have a larger or smaller share of it, from the 

 live atom to the anthropoid ape, that hideous 

 caricature of man. 



It always struck me that those who held 

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