Reflexes, Instincts, and Intelligence 643 



pursued studies of the habits of the solitary wasps. These observers are 

 J. H. Fabre (France) and G. W. and E. G. Peckham (husband and wife, 

 Wisconsin). Now while Fabre holds positively and consistently the belief 

 that this behavior is exclusively instinctive, the Peckhams hold as certainly 

 that it is the result of instinct tempered with and modified by reason. And 

 on this side also stands C. L. Morgan, the great English student of animal 

 behavior in general. 



In the first of Fabre's nine fascinating volumes entitled "Souvenirs 

 Entomologiques, " there are two chapters entitled respectively the Science of 

 Instinct and the Ignorance of Instinct. In one of these is pictured the mar- 

 velous precision, coordination, and certainty of the nest-making and the 

 catching, paralyzing, and storing of the living food by the solitary wasp, for 

 its young. As an example of this behavior, but of this behavior observed 

 without any such illuminating experimental treatment as that with which 

 Fabre accompanies his observations, my account of the behavior of the 

 Ammophila of the Palo Alto salt marshes (see p. 493 of this book) may be 

 referred to. In the second of Fabre's chapters, the one on the "ignorance 

 of instinct," there is pointed out on the other hand the definite limitations of 

 the wasp's behavior. I quote from a translation of this chapter. 



" The Sphex has just shown us with what infallible, transcendent art she 

 acts, guided by the unconscious inspiration of instinct: she will now show 

 how poor she is in resources, how limited in intelligence, and even illogical 

 in cases somewhat out of her usual line. By a strange contradiction, charac- 

 teristic of the instinctive faculties, with deep science is associated ignorance 

 not less deep. Nothing is impossible to instinct, however great be the 

 difficulty. In constructing her hexagonal cells with their floor of three loz- 

 enge-shaped pieces, the bee resolves, with absolute precision, the arduous 

 problems of maximum and minimum, to solve which man would need a 

 powerful mathematical mind. Hymenoptera, whose larvae live on prey, 

 have methods in their murderous art hardly equalled by those of man versed 

 in the most delicate mysteries of anatomy and physiology. Nothing is diffi- 

 cult to instinct so long as the action moves in the unchanging groove allotted 

 to the animal, but, again, nothing is easy to instinct if the action deviates 

 from it. The very insect which amazes us and alarms us by its high intel- 

 ligence, will, a moment later, astonish us by its stupidity before some fact 

 extremely simple, but strange to its usual habits. The Sphex will offer an 

 example. 



"Let us follow her dragging home an ephippiger. If fortune favors us, 

 we may be present at a little scene which I will describe. On entering the 

 shelter under a rock where the burrow is made, the Sphex finds, perched on 

 a blade of grass, a carnivorous insect which, under a most sanctimonious 

 aspect, hides the morals of a cannibal. The danger threatened by this ban- 



