More Hunting Wasps 



a giant or a dwarf still germinating in the 

 ovarian ducts. The mother, therefore, 

 knows the sex of her egg beforehand. 



A strange conclusion, which plays havoc 

 with our current notions ! The logic of the 

 facts leads us to it directly. And yet it 

 seems so absurd that, before accepting it, 

 we seek to escape the predicament by an- 

 other absurdity. We wonder whether the 

 quantity of food may not decide the fate of 

 the egg, originally sexless. Given more 

 food and more room, the egg would become 

 a female; given less food and less room, it 

 would become a male. The mother, obey- 

 ing her instincts, would store more food in 

 this case and less in that; she would build 

 now a large and now a small cell; and the 

 future of the egg would be determined by 

 the conditions of food and shelter. 



Let us make every test, every experiment, 

 down to the absurd: the crude absurdity of 

 the moment has sometimes proved to be the 

 truth of the morrow. Besides, the well- 

 known story of the Hive-bee should make us 

 wary of rejecting paradoxical suppositions. 

 Is it not by increasing the size of the cell, 

 by modifying the quality and quantity of the 

 food, that the population of a hive trans- 

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