278 WASP STUDIES AFIELD 



habitat. He cannot attribute their return to memory, for 

 he says : "It was certainly not memory, but some special 

 faculty which we must content ourselves with recognizing 

 by its astonishing effects without pretending to explain it, 

 so greatly does it transcend our own psychology." 



Bethe thinks that bees returning to the nest " follow a 

 force which is entirely unknown to us, and which causes 

 them to return to the place in space from which they flew." 

 Buttel-Reepen 10 tries to show that Bethe's experiments fur- 

 nish "such excellent proof of the existence of memory for 

 location that we can hardly wish for anything better," and 

 in a footnote to his paper he shows that Fabre's unknown 

 sense theory was abolished as early as 1895 by some experi- 

 ments by Weissmann, who finds that "the only correct solu- 

 tion of the enigma of path-finding by Chalicodoma is that 

 the insects find their way back with their eyes." So per- 

 sistent is Fabre in clinging to his unknown sense theory that 

 again in his chapter on red ants he asks why, "if they issue 

 from the same mold, has one a sense which the other has 

 not, an additional sense constituting a much more over- 

 powering factor than structural details. I will wait until 

 evolutionists give me a valid reason." 



Thus one can see how ever-ready some naturalists are to 

 attribute any unusual behavior to an additional sense or 

 some unknown power. So fearful are they of being 

 branded as individuals ready to attribute some aspect of 

 behavior to an anthropomorphic conception that they prefer 

 to call in some unknown influence to account for conditions. 



In the chapter on Homing in "Mind in Animals," Mr. 

 E. M. Smith says : "At one time the return of bees to the 

 hive or pigeons to the cote after foraging or explorative 

 exhibitions was attributed to instinct, and this implied 

 that the act is little short of miraculous and absolutely in- 



10 Buttel-Reepen, The Natural History of the Honey-Bee, p. 26. 



