REASONABLE BUT UNREASONING 



time this little scene was enacted; the wasp must 

 go into her den and make her preliminary survey 

 before dragging in her prey. That habit had become 

 fixed and there could be no deviation from it, and 

 yet the wasps in many ways seem so surprisingly 

 intelligent ! 



Another bee upon which Fabre experimented 

 builds a cell of masonry, fills it with honey, lays 

 her egg in it, and then seals it up. When the bee was 

 away, Fabre punctured the half-filled cell and let 

 the honey flow out. When the bee returned, she 

 appeared to be disturbed to find her honey gone; 

 she examined the hole through which it had escaped 

 curiously, but made no attempt to repair it, and 

 continued to pour in the honey the same as before. 

 After she had brought the usual quantity — the 

 quantity her forbears had always brought — she 

 laid her egg in the empty cell and sealed it up. 

 The machine had done its work, and it could do 

 nothing not down in the ancestral specifications. 



Dan Beard tells of an ichneumon-fly that tried all 

 one day to thrust its ovipositor into a nail-head in a 

 boar^ in his cabin, mistaking the dark spot which 

 the nail-head made for a hole that led to the burrow 

 of a certain wood-borer which is the host of the 

 ichneumon. Beard thinks the fly desisted only when 

 it had seriously dulled the point of its instrument. 

 I am reminded of one of ourwell-known wild flowers, 

 the erythronium or fawn lily, that will persist in a 

 185 



