THE INSECT MIND 



order of her activities she will do this over and over; 

 she cannot omit one of the links in the fatal chain 

 that binds her deeds together, nor change their 

 order. 



A wasp, so clever in all her natural ways, is fool- 

 ish when these ways are interfered with. She makes 

 a burrow in the soil several inches long, the entrance 

 to which is always hidden by the sliding down 

 of the sand in which the tunnel is made. She 

 finds this entrance unerringly when Fabre himself 

 cannot detect the slightest clue as to its exact 

 whereabouts. But unless she can enter this tunnel 

 at the regular door, she does not know it from any 

 other hole in the ground, and, stranger still, she 

 does not know her own grub asleep at the end of it; 

 she runs over it or pushes it about, looking for the 

 entrance that should guide her to it. The wasp 

 knows her young only as the end of a series of acts 

 that must follow one another in a regular order. 

 And then she does not know it in our human sense : 

 she is a stranger in her own house if you admit her 

 through an opening you have made instead of 

 through the door which she made. 



The intelligence of the insect is the intelligence 

 of Nature — it is action and not reflection. Nature 

 lives and grows, and does not pause to cogitate and 

 ask the reason why, as we do. Her works are a per- 

 petual revelation. Fabre can give good and sufli- 

 cient reasons for every procedure of his insects, but 



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