594 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN- INSTITUTION, 1916. 



absolutely notnmg was suspected of these extraordinary customs. 

 Since then it is acknowledged that Fabre has accorded to the wasps 

 an intensive anatomical knowledge, although many of them stab at 

 random, and certain ones are limited to maiming their victim. The 

 fact of pricking the nerve centers has practically been contested and 

 the paralytic effect attributed to poison much more than to the prick. 

 But there are some defects here as always when criticising researches 

 of a wide range. After all, when Fabre's work is examined there is 

 no trouble in seeing that none of these details had escaped him. He 

 never disputed the paralytic action of the poison inoculated by the 

 insect, and the wonderful researches by the Peckliams on the Pom- 

 pilids, which hunt Lycosids, have clearly established the fact that 

 the thrusts of the sting given by the predatory insect produce two 

 different kinds of paralysis, one fimctional, and often temporary, re- 

 sulting from the action of the venom, the other structural and per- 

 sistent, produced by the dart which more or less injures the nervous 

 centers. 



In philosophy Fabre was a realist, opposed to hypothesis, and con- 

 sequently little inclined toward comparative biology, still less to 

 pry into past times. " Geological strata," he said, "have conserved 

 the forms, but they are silent on the origin of instmcts." He was 

 from that time an opponent of the theories of evolutionists, which 

 he covered with his objections, even with jeers. Intense in his 

 studies, he was not less so in his ideas. He was spirited in discus- 

 sion as well as in his work. His researches on hunting wasps gave 

 to his mind the philosophic bent from which he never deviated. The 

 Tachytes, which hunt Mantids, stabs at the right spot and renders 

 helpless its formidably armed victim. It "therefore knows where 

 the nerve centers of its prey are seated, or what is better it acts 

 as though it knew. This knowledge, of which it is ignorant, has not 

 been acquired by it and by its race through efforts improved from 

 age to age and by habits transmitted from one generation to an- 

 other. * * * The paralyzing power of the Mantids is more dan- 

 gerous and does not allow a half success; under penalty of death, 

 the wasp must be effective the first time. No; the surgical art of 

 the Tachytes is not an acquired trait. Whence, then, does it come, 

 if not from the universal knowledge on which all depends and all 

 lives ? " Fabre reaches the same conclusion for the larvse of the 

 Scolia, very skillful in eating the larvae of rose-chafers (Cetoniids) 

 paralyzed for them, but incapable of this act when they are offered 

 another prey. He says that being in danger of death from a larva 

 not paralyzed, they have not been able to progressively acquire the 

 habitt Their art of eating larvae of the rose-chafers manifested it- 

 self fully from the first. " But then, this is an inborn instinct, the 



