498 Canadian Record of Science 



the insect to modify the essential points of its industry is 

 to hope that one day the nursling will change its way of 

 suckling. 



' ' The insect lacks any re-erecting powers. A blind im- 

 pulse sends it from one act to another and yet to another 

 until the work is finished, without any possibility of go- 

 ing back to an interrupted act if accidents happen. The 

 cycle accomplished the work appears highly logical, but 

 the work is done by a workman without logic. 



The Pursuit of Pleasure. 



"And the stimulus of this labour is the pursuit of 

 pleasure, that main motive spring in the animal world. 

 The mother insect has no foresight of the future larvae. 

 She does not hunt, nor build, nor provision with any con- 

 scious view of the family which will be raised. Her real 

 goal is occult. For her what drives her on as sole guide 

 is the pleasure derived accessory to the work. The Pelo- 

 pgeus wasp feels great satisfaction in filling her cell with 

 spiders even when her egg has been extracted. Imper- 

 turbably she continues to hunt, though her work is use- 

 less. It appears insane to us, but she gets her fun out of 

 it. To reproach the insect for such aberration is to sup- 

 pose it endowed with the little gleam of intelligence 

 which Darwin wished to establish for it. If it is de- 

 prived of any such gleam, the reproach cannot lie, and its 

 acts of aberration are the inevitable resultants of an un- 

 consciousness pushed aside from its normal paths. 



"A thousand theoretical views do not equal in value 

 one fact. Scientific solutions of problems call for an 

 enormous number of well-established facts, "and that is 

 why I have observed, and above all experimented," says 

 Henri Frabe : ' To observe, although something, is not 

 enough; one needs must experiment; that is to say, one 

 must intervene oneself and make artificial conditions 

 which will put the animal to the necessity of unveiling 

 what would not happen in the normal course of events. 

 Formerly zoology was denied any title to experimental 



