MIGRATION. 293 



overcome their feeling ; it is accompanied by great nervous- 

 ness and a general sense of dismay and 'upset.' The nervous- 

 ness comes after the seizure, and is not the cause of it. This 

 is spoken of by the natives as ' getting turned round.' The 

 feeling sometimes ceases suddenly, or it may wear away 

 gradually. Colonel Lodge, in his ' Hunting Grounds of the 

 Far West,' 1876, speaks of the same kind of feelings seizing 

 upon, and occasionally demoralizing, old and experienced 

 prairie travellers. Indian chiefs all concurred in assuring 

 G. Catlin (' Life amongst the Indians,' p. 96) that 'whenever 

 a man is lost on the prairies, he travels in a circle, and also 

 tli at he invariably turns to the left ; of which singular fact,' 

 the author adds, ' I have become doubly convinced by subse- 

 quent proofs.' " 



But it is evident that definite experiments on this homing 

 faculty, both in men and in animals, are required before we 

 can be in a position to say anything more with regard to it 

 than admitting it as a matter of fact. The only experiments 

 which have been made, so far as I am aware, are those of Sir 

 John Lubbock, on the sense of direction in the Hymenoptera 

 (to which I shall allude presently), and those which have 

 more recently been published by M. Fabre * who also ex- 

 perimented upon the Hymenoptera. As the last-named 

 author believes that he has established a very definite conclu- 

 sion by means of his experiments, it is necessary that I 

 should make a few remarks upon them. 



At the suggestion of Mr. Darwin, he placed some marked 

 mason-bees in a closed papei box, carried them thus im- 

 prisoned for soi list ance in one direction, then rotated the 



box and carried them a much greater distance in the opposite 

 direction, after which he released the insects. He found 

 that when the distance to which the bees were taken was as 

 much as three kilometres, and even when the rotation was 

 very considerable (the box being placed in a sling; and 

 rol ited in various planes at several points in the route) a 

 certain percentage of the bees returned home. It made no 



difference Whether the bees were released in an open space or 

 iii a thick wood ; neither did it make any difference whether 



the outgoing journey were performed in a straight line or in 

 a circuitous curve. Pi these experiments M. Fabre con- 



• Noureajx Souvenirs Bnlomologiquet, L882, pp. '.'J 1-3. 



