REPORT OF THE SOCIETY 19 



intuition or instinct and intelligence, seen in their highest in insects and 

 man respectively. 



"It Ues dormant when Hfe is condemned to automatism; it wakes as 

 soon as the possibiUty of choice is restored." Instinct being so dififerent 

 in its origin from intelHgence cannot be fairly described in terms of intel- 

 ligence, but "it is not situated beyond the limits of mind." Bergson says: 

 "In the phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, 

 we experience in ourselves — though under a much vaguer form and one 

 too much penetrated with ntelligence — ^something of what must happen 

 in the consciousness of an insect acting by instinct." 



While the vitalists and the mechano-physicists wrangle over prob- 

 lems of life and its origin, the ordinary worker may console himself with 

 the thought that the two schools view organisms from different angles 

 and with different instruments, and hence their interpretations are differ- 

 ent. There is much truth in both views, but on account of the limitations 

 of the observer neither view probably expresses the whole truth. The 

 vitalists see consciousness in an organism which responds to a stimulus, 

 the mechanists find that tropic reactions are results of the irritability of 

 protoplasm, which again depends upon metabolic changes. Is not the 

 real trouble the fact that the vitalist's view is expressed in psychological 

 terms, while that of the mechanists is expressed in terms of physics and 

 chemistry? 



Regarding the economic aspect of a study of tropisms, reference should 

 be made here to a remark made by Prof. Herrick of Cornell University in 

 his address as President of the American Association of Economic Ento- 

 mologists. He says: — 



"Not long ago I had the opportunity of visiting certain intensely 

 busy fields of economic entomological work in the southern part of 

 the United States. During this trip, I saw two phases of work that 

 greatly interested me and that left an impression on my mind that 

 grows with the lapse of time. The two series of experiments dealt 

 with the tropisms of two notorious insect pests — in one case with the 

 chemotropism of a small beetle, in the other case with the photo- 

 tropism of a small moth. I do not know that any satisfactory re- 

 sults in either case have yet been obtained. I do know, however, that 

 these experiments are being made in a fundamental way and I feel 

 that they are fraught with undreamed of possibilities in the way of 

 insect control." 



