252 POWER OF DETERMINING SEX. 



That bees soon take to newly introduced flowers is a 

 familiar case wliicli every one must have noticed, and 

 which it is surely not logical to dismiss by the conve- 

 nient process of referring it to " instinct." It is indeed 

 difficult for any one who watches these insects to deny 

 to bees the possession of a higher and conscious faculty. 



In considering the question whether these remarkable 

 instincts were originally, so to say, engrafted in the 

 insect, or whether they were the result of innumerable 

 repetitions of similar actions carried on by a long 

 series of ancestors, we may perhaps be aided by the 

 consideration that, though the results would in either 

 case be in many respects the same, there are some in 

 which they would altogether differ. In the former, for 

 instance, we might expect that the insect would be so 

 gifted that no slight obstacle should interfere with the 

 great end in view : in the latter, on the contrary, the 

 very repetition which gave such remarkable results 

 would tend to incapacitate the insect from dealing with 

 any unusual conditions. 



Limitation of Instinct. 



We should, in fact, find side by side with these won- 

 derful instincts almost equally surprising evidence of 

 stupidity. Now, one species of Sphex preys on a large 

 grasshopper (Ephippigera). Having disabled her vic- 

 tim, she drags it along by one of the antennae, and 

 M. Fabre found that if the antennae be cut off close to 

 the head, the Sphex, after trying in vain to get a grip, 

 gives the matter up as a bad job, and leaves her victim 

 in despair, without ever thinking of dragging it by one 

 of its legs. Again, when a Sphex had provisioned her 

 cell, laid her egg, and was about to close it up, M. 



