Many Inventions : A Study in Natural History. 3 



But between the lower level, covered perhaps by the 

 concepts of structural adaptiveness and general endeavour to find 

 equilibrium and satisfaction, and the higher levels where plastic 

 intelligence holds the reins, or did in the past play the cards 

 supplied by germinal variations, there is the large and puzzling 

 field of what may be called instinctive inventiveness. 



The tailor ants use their larvse to supply the thread for their 

 sewing ; a common harvesting ant of South Europe makes biscuits 

 of chewed seeds ; a few ants go far in the direction of domesticating 

 Aphids ; many Termites grow moulds on si)ecially constructed 

 beds ; the cuckoo-spit saves its life by blowing soap-bubbles ; 

 many Digger- Wasps store paralysed caterpillars for their young, 

 which they do not survive to see ; one of them sometimes uses a 

 pebble (like a tool) in her mouth to close the mouth of the 

 burrow smoothly ; some ants and wasps have entered into a 

 strange nutritive give-and-take relation with the larvae of the 

 nest ; the larval tiger-beetle has an ingenious way of smashing 

 the small insects that rest on the living trap-door of its burrow ; 

 the water-spider makes a web at the foot of the pool, though it 

 is a member of a thoroughly terrestrial race, breathing dry air ; 

 the trap-door spider invented the hinge ; the gossamer spiders 

 make aerial journeys without wings. It certainly looks as if 

 animals thought out many inventions. 



If we can accept the view that the gains of novel individual 

 experience, registered in the structure of the nervous system 

 during the individual lifetime, are entailed, even in some repre- 

 sentative degree, on the progeny, then the puzzle of accounting 

 for the apparent inventions below the level of dominant intelligence 

 would be lessened. 



If we caimot accept the Lamarckian or Neo-Lamarckian view 

 of the entailment of the structural results of novel or peculiar 

 individual experiences, what then '1 The following theory is 

 suggested: (l) In the germ-cells, which somehow epitomise the 

 past, novelties or variations or mutations are of frequent 

 pccurrence, — not "anyhow" variations, however, but new 



