THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



When I come from the vast to the minute, I find 

 equal cause for wonder and admiration. If I look at 

 the body of a fly with my pocket-glass, or at the 

 speck of an insect that crawls upon the page of my 

 book as I read, I marvel at its exquisite structure 

 and delicate adjustment of parts, the elaboration, 

 the complexity, the ingenuity, the strange mechan- 

 ism of it all. When I crush it, I feel what a consum- 

 mation of creative workmanship, what a delicate 

 and exquisite product of the long ages of evolution, 

 I have brought to naught. When I see the marvel- 

 ous intelligence of ants and bees with their com- 

 munities and cooperations and complex economies, 

 I cannot help but wonder what might have been the 

 result had evolution continued on the same line, 

 and mounted step by step, as it has in the verte- 

 brates. Would some being with more intellect than 

 man has, have been the result? Maybe it was so on 

 Mars, or on some other world in the depths of space. 



It is hard for us to conceive of mental gifts differ- 

 ing in kind from our own, but it is certain that the 

 wisdom that the insect world possesses is not like 

 our own, and comes to it in a way we know not of. 

 The ants and bees do things that seem to imply 

 what we call second sight, or a gift akin to clairvoy- 

 ance. Take the case of one of the solitary wasps of 

 which Sir John Lubbock tells us. When this wasp 

 lays an egg, she acts as if she knew whether the egg 

 would produce a male or a female; she puts five 

 17 



