THE INSECT MIND 



another, and then equips that other to escape its 

 enemy. The rabbit has no defense but its speed and 

 its sleepless eyes, yet these suffice. The animals that 

 are the prey of the stealthy cat tribe are almost pre- 

 ternaturally alert and keen of eye and scent. 

 Nature has told them who is shadowing them. 



The intelligence of Nature outside of man con- 

 sists largely in adapting a means to an end, and the 

 end is foreshadowed in the organization. Propose to 

 an animal a new end, not in line with its instinctive 

 activities, and it is helpless. This is markedly true 

 in the insect world; their activities are like the 

 activity of your watch, which ticks off the hours 

 in orderly sequence, but which cannot tick off one 

 second in the opposite direction. 



"To know everything and to know nothing," 

 says Fabre, "according as it acts under normal or 

 exceptional conditions: that is the strange antith- 

 esis presented by the insect race," and he might 

 have added, "by nearly all the lower orders of 

 animal life." Inside the field of their instinctive 

 activities their wisdom is truly astonishing; out- 

 side that field their ignorance and stupidity are 

 equally astonishing. An animal must know certain 

 things in order to survive and perpetuate itself, or 

 rather we should say, it must perform certain acts 

 in order to survive — whether or not it knows what 

 it is doing, as we know, is a question. 



The wasp that is such a skilled surgeon hauls its 



133 



