November 5, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



445 



gence, aa Bergson says, to mount on the -mngs of 

 instinct. It does not soar far, nor very higih, be- 

 cause its efforts very soon congeal in automatic 

 form, tiut "with each attempt the instinctive sub- 

 stratum is augmented to give the animal a vaster 

 field of activity. Thus we reach the higher Artic- 

 ulates in which the most complex automatic activi- 

 ties, fringed with intelligence, become concatenated 

 and purposive as if they had been regulated by 

 reason. Hence we repeat here what we said at the 

 beginning of the present work: The Articulates 

 never differ so greatly from us as when they seem 

 to resemble us most closely. 



Chapter IX. on the behavior of the 

 Pompilids, dravra very largely from the 

 valuable researches of Perez and his pupil 

 Ferton, is admirably written and can be 

 recommended to those who are inclined to 

 imderestimate the value of ethological and 

 historical methods in comparative psychology. 

 An even more interesting chapter could, how- 

 ever, be compUed from the literature on these 

 solitary wasps. On page 161 Bouvier tells 

 us that " it is unfortunate that no biologist 

 up to the present time has been able to 

 witness the oviposition of Oeropales," thus 

 overlooking completely the very interesting 

 observations of Adlerz^ on the surreptitious 

 oviposition of this parasite in the lung-books 

 of the spiders that have been captured by the 

 host Pompilid. The extraordinary habits of 

 one of the American Pompilids, described by 

 JSTeedham and Lloyd in their " Life of Inland 

 Waters," 1916, also deserve mention in such 

 a chapter as the one under consideration. 

 According to these authors. 



There is a black wasp, Priocnemis flavicornis, oc- 

 casionally seen on Fall Creek at the Cornell Bio- 

 logical Field Station, that combines flying with 

 water transportation. Beavers swim with boughs 

 for their dam, and water striders run across the 

 surface carrying their booty, but here is a wasp 

 that flies above the surface towing a load too heavy 

 to be carried. The freight is the body of a huge 

 black spider several times as large as the body of 

 the wasp. It is captured by the wasp in a water- 

 side hunting expedition, paralyzed by a sting 

 adroitly placed, and is to be used for provisioning 

 her nest. It ooiild scarcely be dragged across the 



a Bik. K. Svensk. Vet. Akad. Hand., 1902. 



ground, clothed as that is with the dense vegeta- 

 tion of the waterside; but the placid stream is an 

 open highway. Out on to the surface the wasp 

 drags the huge limp black carcass of the spider 

 and, mounting into the air with her engines going 

 and her wings steadily buzzing, she sails across 

 the water, trailing the spider and leaving a wake 

 that is a miniature of that of a passing steamer. 

 She sails a direct and unerring course to the 

 vicinity of her burrow in the bank and brings her 

 cargo ashore at some nearby landing. She hauls it 

 up on the bank and then runs to her hole to see 

 that all is ready. Then ^e drags the spider up 

 the bank and into her burrow, having saved much 

 time and energy by making use of the open water- 



Additional peculiarities of habit among the 

 Pompilids have been described by other 

 authors, notably by F. X. Williams in a 

 recent work on the wasps of the Philippines.^ 



In the second part of the work Bouvier 

 discusses certain selected phenomena which 

 have been long and intensively studied by 

 entomologists, the relations of insects to 

 flowers, the homing of bees, ants and other 

 insects, parthenogenesis and the determination 

 of sex among the Hymenoptera and social life 

 among the Articulates. When we consider 

 that the researches on all these subjects have 

 resiilted in vast accumulations of observa- 

 tions, often hidden away in inaccessible 

 journals and monographs, and a most be- 

 wildering diversity of interpretations, the 

 author deserves high praise for his brief, 

 concise and orderly presentation. Inadequacy 

 of treatment was imavoidable in many cases, 

 as, e. g., the omission of any consideration of 

 the important experimental contributions of 

 Brun (1914) to the subject of the orientation 

 and homing of ants and other animals. Any 

 adequate treatment of even a portion of in- 

 sect ethology at the present time would, of 

 course, require several volumes and would 

 transcend the powers of any entomologist. 

 Most readers will be delighted with Bouvier's 

 book as it stands, with its lucid diction, its 

 lack of dog-matie assertion, its kindly and 



3 Bull. No. 14, Exper. Station Hawaiian Sug. 

 Plant. Assoc, 1919. 



