Summary and Discussion 213 
room; of these, only two returned later. This fact worried 
Fabre greatly, and he tried to account for the non return of 
the twelve by the surmise that the ‘‘Great Peacock is worn out 
by the ardours of pairing time.’’ He forgot for the moment 
that the two that did return were under the same strees of 
pairing time. Fabre says that they lived only two or three days 
and in the same breath says that the female lived eight days. 
It seems probable, therefore, that their failure to return was 
due to other influences than short life. 
Perhaps Fabre’s reluctance in accepting odor and wind as 
the factors which bring them together is due to his impression 
that they came from all directions. Without careful outdoor 
observations, how could he tell but that the behavior was the 
same as Mayer and Soule found for promethea flying against 
the wind as mentioned above. 
Fabre, however, at one period in his peacock work, really 
suspected odor as the agent, but when males were still attracted 
ie females even when he placed napthaline in the room, his 
“‘eonfidence in the olfactory explanation is shaken.’’ He for 
the time forgot that the napthaline odor meant nothing pro or 
con in the life of this moth; it was something entirely outside 
its experience in the natural world. But really Fabre must have 
thought better of the ‘‘olfactory explanation’’ than he was will- 
ing to admit, because next year when he got poor results he 
says: ‘‘low temperature is unfavorable to the tell-tale effluvia, 
which might be enhanced by warmth and decreased by cold, as 
happens with scents.”’ 
The third year he got large numbers to fly to the females; he 
moved the latter about each morning and then says: ‘‘all of 
these sudden displacements contrived to se seekers off their 
scent do not trouble the moths in the least.’’ Even then he was 
not ready to give odor and odor perception any credit, for he 
suspected ‘‘wireless telegraphy by means of Hertzian waves is 
the means for attracting the males.’’ He soon rejected the idea 
of wireless telegraphy as a means for attracting the males, when 
he lodged females in air-tight boxes of various materials and 
got no males to respond, but he did get them to come when he 
placed the females in poorly closed and cracked receptacles. In 
his work on the Lesser Peacock moth, Aitacus pavoma minor, 
he says they arrived ‘‘with a tortuous flight.’’ The flight, it 
