io8 Instinct and its Lessons 



Frogs and Toads, all alive and able to sprawl helplessly, 

 but each bitten accurately through the brain, so as to 

 incapacitate them for locomotion. 1 The devices of the 

 Wasps I have mentioned are paralleled by those insects 

 on which they practise. Thus a Spider in whose web 

 a Beetle had been entangled, and who was in trouble 

 with so boisterous and unruly a prey, has been observed 

 to bite through one of the fore-legs; the Beetle then 

 bending its head to soothe the injured limb, the 

 Spider quickly passed a thread round its head, and 

 bound it down in a position that made further struggle 

 hopeless. 



Insects that live in community, as Bees, Wasps, and 

 Ants, need the most complicated machinery of instinct, 

 that their polity should stand. The individual members 

 must be willing not only to work, but to work for others, 

 and not for themselves, and they must be respectively 

 ready for the diverse functions assigned to them. To 

 quote Reaumur, " Hardly are all the parts of the young 

 Bee dried, hardly are its wings in a state to be moved, 

 than it knows all it will have to do for the rest of its life. 

 It seems to know that it is bora for society. Like the 

 others it leaves the common habitation, and goes in 

 search of flowers. It goes to them alone, and is not 

 embarrassed to find its way back to the hive. If it goes 

 to draw honey, it is less to feed itself than to commence 

 its labours for the common weal, for, from its first 

 journey, it sometimes makes a collection of wax. M. 

 Maraldi assures us that he has seen Bees return to the 

 hive loaded with large balls of this substance the same 

 day they were born." 2 To estimate the practical skill 

 which a wax-worker Bee requires we must remember 

 that the form of his cell is exactly what it should be, to 

 give a maximum of strength and capacity with a 

 minimum of material, and that to calculate this form 

 mathematicians have to propose to themselves the 



1 Magazine of Natural History, vol. vi. p. 206. Quoted by 

 Mivart, Lessons from Nature. 



2 Reaumur, Hist, des Insectes, t. v. mem. xi. 



