212 BOMBAY DUCKS 



ing all day long for her offspring which she will never 

 see. I do not think that she even knows that her eggs 

 will give rise to young wasps. She toils for the benefit 

 of these because that strange internal force which we 

 call instinct compels her to do so. She knows not 

 what she is doing, yet no human parent could work 

 harder in the interests of her offspring. Analogy 

 would lead us to think that the female wasp loves her 

 children. Yet this is impossible. The question thus 

 arises therefore in the case of the higher animals, how 

 much of their solicitude for their offspring is due to 

 affection and how much to blind instinct? 



The grub which the egg will produce is both car- 

 nivorous and voracious, and, what is more, it must be 

 fed upon fresh meat. Here, then, is a difficult problem 

 which the wasp has to solve : how to provide fresh 

 meat for her offspring. It is obviously useless to kill 

 some creatures and place them underground, for by 

 the time the young one hatches out the food will have 

 become putrid. If, on the other hand, she catch some 

 feeble creatures and put them alive into the nest, 

 they will wriggle and struggle, so that, if they do not 

 damage the egg, they will at least knock it away from 

 them. This would be fatal were it to take place, for 

 the grub, when it first emerges from the egg, is so weak 

 that it cannot move by so much as a hair's breadth, 

 so that it will starve to death unless it is hatched right 

 in the midst of its food-supply. 



Let us see how the wasp solves the problem. She 

 presently returns carrying a thin greenish caterpillar 

 quite as long as herself. She flies with it into the 



