RATIONALISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 245 



forming the circular form, after the ordinary type of the 

 humble-bee. While trap-door spiders make excellent 

 doors to their chambers in Mentone, our English species 

 makes none, but simply tears a hole in the wall to drag 

 its prey inside and then mends it again. 



This method appears to have now become a fixed 

 and instinctive habit. 



On the other hand, there are some instincts which are 

 still inexplicable such as the so-called " homing " of 

 animals. Dogs and cats have been taken long distances 

 by train, and yet have found their way back across 

 several counties. No one at present seems able to 

 explain how it is done. 



With regard to the homing instinct Romanes records 

 " Evidence of a cat finding its way home from London 

 to Huddersfield, a distance of 200 miles ; of a dog 

 returning to its home in Sutherlandshire from Berwick- 

 on-Tweed, having been taken to Berwick by sea, and 

 returning by land, etc. In such cases short cuts are often 

 made over third sides of triangles ; but it is interesting 

 that in one of my cases, communicated to me by an 

 intelligent correspondent, some horses, in taking a short 

 cut for home, were brought up, after a journey of several 

 hundred miles, on the end of a peninsula, where they do 

 not seem to have had sense enough to double back." 



Homing instinct cannot be identically the same thing 

 as that of a carrier pigeon ; for as Prof Loeb says : " It 

 seems to be certain that the carrier pigeon finds its way 

 back by the visual memory of the locality from which it 

 started." He says the same thing of solitary wasps, bees 

 and ants.i 



Prof Loeb remarks : " It always seemed to me one 



^ Comparative Physiology of the Brain, p. 196. 



