1 82 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



winged Sphex, which has chosen the cricket for its 

 victim, knows that the cricket has three nerve-centres 

 which serve its three pairs of legs or at least it acts as 

 if it knew this. It stings the insect first under the 

 neck, then behind the prothorax, and then where the 

 thorax joins the abdomen. 1 The Ammophila Hirsuta 

 gives nine successive strokes of its sting upon nine 

 nerve-centres of its caterpillar, and then seizes the head 

 and squeezes it in its mandibles, enough to cause 

 paralysis without death. 2 The general theme is &quot; the 

 necessity of paralysing without killing &quot; ; the variations 

 are subordinated to the structure of the victim on 

 which they are played. No doubt the operation is not 

 always perfect. It has recently been shown that the 

 Ammophila sometimes kills the caterpillar instead of 

 paralysing it, that sometimes also it paralyses it incom 

 pletely. 3 But, because instinct is, like intelligence, 

 fallible, because it also shows individual deviations, it 

 does not at all follow that the instinct of the Ammo 

 phila has been acquired, as has been claimed, by tenta 

 tive intelligent experiments. Even supposing that the 

 Ammophila has come in course of time to recognize, 

 one after another, by tentative experiment, the points 

 of its victim which must be stung to render it motion 

 less, and also the special treatment that must be 

 inflicted on the head to bring about paralysis without 

 death, how can we imagine that elements so special of 

 a knowledge so precise have been regularly transmitted, 

 one by one, by heredity ? If, in all our present ex 

 perience, there were a single indisputable example of a 

 transmission of this kind, the inheritance of acquired 



1 Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques, i re se&quot;rie, 3* Edition, Paris, 1894, pp. 



93 ff 



Fabre, Nouveaux souvenirs entotnologiijufs, Paris, 1882, pp. 14 ff. 

 3 Peckham, Wasps, Solitary and Social, Westminster, 1905, pp. 28 ff. 



