444 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. YoL. LII. No. 1349 



In this interesting little volume Bouvier 

 endeavors to present an up-to-date sketch of 

 insect behavior. In the .introduction he 

 quotes the following remarkable passage from 

 Maeterlinck's paper on Fabre and his work:^ 



The insect does not belong to our world. Other 

 animals and even the plants, despite their mute 

 lives and the great secrets they enfold, seem not 

 to be such total strangers, for we still feel in 

 them, notwithstanding all their peculiarities, a cer- 

 tain terrestrial fraternity. They may surprise or 

 even amaze us at times, but they do not completely 

 upset our thoughts. Something in the insects, how- 

 ever, seems to be alien to the habits, morals and 

 psychology of our globe, as df it had come from 

 some other planet, more monstrous, more energetic, 

 more insensa;te, more atrocious, more infernal than 

 our own. With whatever authority, with whatever 

 fecundity, unequalled here below, the insect seizes 

 on life, we fail to accustom ourselves to the 

 thought that it is an expression of that nature 

 whose privileged offspring we claim to be. . . . 

 No doubt, in this astonishment and failure to 

 comprehend, we are beset with an indefinable, pro- 

 found and instinctive uneasiness, inspired by be- 

 ings so incomparaJbly better armed and endowed 

 than ourselves, concentrations of energy and ac- 

 tivity in which we divine our most mysterious foes, 

 the rivals of our last hours and perhaps our suc- 

 cessors. . . . 



And Bouvier adds : 



We have the feeling that the psychic evolution 

 of these animals must be no less original than 

 their structure and that they never differ so 

 greatly from us as when they seem to resemble us 

 most closely. 



Bouvier's discussion of the psychic life of 

 insects is divided into two parts, a "method- 

 ical " part, comprising Chapters I. to IX. and 

 a " special " part, comprising the five con- 

 cluding chapters. The methodical part treats 

 of the tropisms, vital rhythms, diilerential 

 sensibility, organic, specific and individual 

 (associative) memory, the learning process, 

 the modifications of habits, the evolution of 

 instinct* and in the ninth chapter of the 

 comparative or historical method as illus- 



1 Ann. Folit. Lit., 2 AvrU, 1911. 



trated by a single Hymenopterous family, the 

 PsammocharidEe (Pompilidse). Loeb and Bohn 

 are at first rather rigidly followed, and the 

 author is not very favorable to the position 

 of Jennings. He attributes the " trial and 

 error" activities to differential sensibility and 

 even tries to use this as a partial explanation 

 of " death feigning." But later his treatment 

 of the problems of insect behavior broadens 

 out and he reveals himself as a sane and 

 catholic Neolamarckian, with strong eclectic 

 tendencies and willing to utilize natural 

 selection, Mendelism and mutationism in ac- 

 counting for certain phenomena such as the 

 sexual differences in instincts and the evolu- 

 tion of the worker and soldier castes in social 

 insects. His general position is summarized 

 at the end of the eighth chapter in the follow- 

 ing paragraphs : 



Owing to their tropisms, their rhythms, the 

 adaptive manifestations of their differential sensi- 

 bility, but especially their ability to transform 

 ha/bits into automatisms, the Articulates are es- 

 sentially creatures of instinct, whose activities are 

 largely made up of automatisms, but automatisms 

 dominated by cerebral control ("puissance c6re- 

 brale"). They can not be regarded as simple 

 ' ' reflex machines, ' ' because they can adapt them- 

 selves to circumstances, acquire new habits, learn 

 to remember, and manifest discernment. They 

 might be regarded as somnambules, whose minds 

 awake and give evidence of intelligence when the 

 need is felt, and this takes us a long way be- 

 yond the mechanism of which Bethe has made 

 himself the protagonist. 



The activity of insects is characterized by two 

 essential peculiarities: first, the presence of mul- 

 tiple, more or less perfectly adapted appendages, 

 and second, the power very quickly to transform 

 acts originally intelligent into automatic acts. 

 This latter character is without doubt a conse- 

 quence of the former, for the appendages are in- 

 struments both structurally and functionally al- 

 most congealed (figfe). At any rate, there can be 

 no doubt that this is the principal factor in the 

 evolution of the Articulates. Owing to this pe- 

 culiarity, in fact, the automatic activity of the 

 animal can go on enriching itself with new ele- 

 ments borrowed from intelligence and thus adapted 

 to new necessities. A substratum of activity is 

 thus produced and develops, permitting inteUi- 



