156 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



readily steal honey from other hives. But in a great 

 number of experiments which I have tried in which 

 the queenless bees have been left without either 

 egg or larva from which to begin a new queen, I 

 have never had a case in which they have attempted 

 to avoid extinction by obtaining a larva or egg from 

 another hive, which they might easily do. Bees 

 have a wonderful instinct for finding their way. 

 Yet out of their usual habits they readily lose it. 

 If one among her companions is killed, the others 

 exhibit neither fear, nor resentment, nor interest. 

 If one is provoked to use her sting, she makes no 

 intelligent attempt to withdraw it, as she sometimes 

 might do, but walks away, stupidly dragging out 

 her entrails and causing her own death by the act. 

 The instincts by which migratory birds find their 

 way, year after year, for thousands of miles, over 

 wastes of sea and land, appear to us little short of 

 marvellous, and seem often to indicate in like manner 

 a high order of intelligence. Yet it by no means 

 follows that we are witnessing in these cases also 

 any more than a mechanical or unreflecting response 

 of the organism to its environment. Why the 

 powers appear to us so wonderful is that we do not 

 always know the exact nature of the stimulus, and 

 possibly do not ourselves possess, or possess only in 

 a very rudimentary form, the senses which are 

 concerned in responding to it. The attunement of 

 an organism in this manner to the calls of its environ- 

 ment, through senses which are beyond us, but 

 senses which compel it to do mechanically what in 

 the higher animals is done by intelligence, is, never- 

 theless, one of the most wonderful products of 

 natural selection. 



