SIR JOIIN LUBBOCK OK ANTS, BEES, ANB WASPS. 135 
the Natural History Society of Wisconsin’* a very interesting 
paper on the special senses of wasps, and their conclusions concur 
closely with mine. 
It appears from their observations that some wasps stay out 
all night and return early in the morning before the others begin 
coming out. For instance, on the 18th Aug. the first wasps left 
the nest at 7.25 ; 10, however, had already returned, 3 of them 
before 5 a.m. It appears from their observations that the 
average time a wasp is absent from the nest, that is the average 
length of each excursion, is 43 minutes. They observe that this 
may appear inconsistent with my observations, -when the trips 
were shorter and more numerous, one of my wasps having paid 
me 116 visits in 15 hours and a half. But, as they justly observe, 
the cases are not comparable. My wasps and theirs were like 
Jacob and Ishmael — mine had everything ready prepared for 
them, theirs had to hunt for themselves. 
As regards the sense of hearing, they repeated some of my 
experiments with the same results. They seem to consider that 
as regards the sense of colour their conclusions are somewhat 
at variance with mine. 
As regards the supposed sense of direction they sayf: — “Sir 
John Lubbock, in dealing with the sense of direction in ants, con- 
cluded, after a number of observations, that they were endowed 
with this sense in a high degree. Subsequently he discovered, 
quite accidentally, that the ants found their way by observing 
the direction in which the light was falling.” My conclusion 
was, however, the result of many observations carried on under 
varied conditions, and I should hardly call it an accident. 
They came to the conclusion, as I had done, that wasps have 
no sense of direction, that is to say in the form of a mysterious 
additional sense, but that, if they do not know where they are, they 
rise higher and higher into the air, circling as they do so, until they 
discover some high treetop or other object that had before served 
them as a landmark, and that in this way they are able to make 
their way home. This entirely tallies with my own conclusion. It 
is interesting as showing that the vision of wasps must be good 
for somewhat distant objects. 
They also found, as I had done, that their memory varied 
greatly in different individuals. 
* April 1887. 
t Proc. Nat. Hist. Soc. Wisconsin, April 1887, p. 113. 
12 * 
