238 NATURE STUDIES. 



feelings and ideas depend upon the arrangement of 

 the various sense-organs and their connected central 

 parts, it will be clear that, after all, we may make a 

 fair guess at what is passing in this little beetle's 

 head, especially since his notions about things 

 generally must in all probability be a good deal 

 simpler and more directly dependent upon his sensa- 

 tions than our own. 



Now, what, in the first place, are the beetle's 

 senses ? He can see, that we all know ; and his sight 

 is on the whole a good deal like our own. His eye 

 can discriminate form, and that accurately, for in all 

 flying creatures this sense is necessarily highly deve- 

 loped; it has been evolved and perfected side by 

 side with their wings, or else they could never have 

 learned to fly at all. They can doubtless distinguish 

 colour, too; for we know positively from Sir John 

 Lubbock's experiments that this is the case with 

 bees, and there are good grounds for believing that 

 the same thing is true of all flower-feeding insects as 

 well, since all alike seem to be guided to the flowers 

 by their brilliant hues. Sir John put drops of honey 

 on slips of glass above bits of coloured paper ; and 

 when he had once taught a bee to feed from one slip, 

 say the blue, he found that it would return straight 

 to that slip, even when the relative places of the 

 colours had been transposed. Now, almost all flowers 

 which contain honey have also bright petals; and 

 Mr. Darwin has shown that both honey and petals 

 have been developed by the flowers for the sake of 



