168 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. 



bee mistake a sea-anemone (Tcalia crassicornis), which was 

 " covered merely by a rim of water," for a flower— darting 

 into the centre of the disk, " and though it struggled a "ood 

 deal to get free, was retained till it was drowned, and was 

 then swallowed.* The fact, alluded to by Mr. Darwin in the 

 Appendix, that the workers of the humble-bee attempt to 

 devour the eggs laid by their own queen, appears to constitute 

 a remarkable case of imperfect instinct. Again, Huber saw a 

 bee begin a cell in a wrong direction, and other bees tear it 

 to pieces. Bees have also been observed to collect rye-flower 

 when damp instead of pollen.f " Pollen-getting, according to 

 Gebien, is the weak point in the character of bees ; " for this 

 author observes (p. 74) that they " lay up useless hoards of it, 

 which they go on augmenting every year, and this is the only 

 point on which they can be accused of want of prudence." 



Mr. Darwin's MS notes contain a brief record of a 

 number of observations on ants (F. tufa) carrying pupa 

 skins, with a great and apparently useless expenditure of 

 labour, far away from the nest, and even up trees. He tried 

 taking away the skins from some of the carriers, and replacing 

 them near the nest ; the first ants that happened to fall in 

 with them again carried them off. This, as the notes 

 observe, appears to be a case of " blundering instinct ; " and 

 the same epithet may be applied to mistakes made by the 

 harvesting ants observed by Mr. Moggridge, which carefully 

 stored in their granaries the gall- apples of a small species of 

 Cynips, clearly imagining that they were nuts ; and also, 

 under a similar delusion, stored small beads which Mog- 

 gridge, in order to test their instinct, scattered in their 

 harvesting fields.^ 



Among Birds we find mistaken instinct exhibited by the 

 cuckoo when it lays two eggs in the same nest, with the 

 inevitable result that one of the young birds will afterwards 

 eject the other. In the same category we may place the 

 promiscuous dropping of her eggs on the part of the rhea ; 

 small birds frequently mistaking a larger and unfamiliar bird 

 for a hawk, as shown by their mobbing it ; and numberless 

 special cases could be given of mistaken instinct in the 

 matter of nest-building — in the selection of unsuitable sites, 

 unsuitable materials, and so on. 



* Critic, March 24, 1860. f Cottage Gardener, April, 1860 p. 48. 

 X Harvesting Ants and Trap-door Spiders, p. '67, et seq. 



