Habit and Instinct. 439 



ginning to devour her offspring ; for the egg of the 

 anthophora serves not only as a raft, but as a repast. 

 The honey, which is enough for either, would be too little 

 for both ; and the sitaris, therefore, at its first meal, 

 relieves itself from its only rival. After eight days the egg 

 is consumed, and on the empty shell the sitaris undergoes 

 its first transformation, and makes its appearance in a 

 very different form. ... It changes into a white, fleshy 

 grub, so organized as to float on the surface of the honey, 

 with the mouth beneath and the spiracles above the 

 surface. ... In this state it remains until the honey is 

 consumed;"* and, after some further metamorphoses, 

 develops into a perfect beetle in August. 



Now, it seems to me difficult to understand how, at any 

 stage of this long series of highly adaptive, instinctive 

 activities, lapsed intelligence can have been a factor. And 

 therefore I say, if such a complex series f can have resulted 



* M. Fabre, as interpreted by Sir John Lubbock, "Scientific Lectures," 

 2nd edit., p. 45. 



f In further illustration of the fact that purposiveness and complex 

 adaptation of activities is no criterion of present or past direction by intelli- 

 gence, we may draw attention to the action of the leucocytes, or white blood- 

 corpuscles. Metchnikoff found that in the water-flea (Daphnia), affected by 

 spores of Monospora bieuspidata, a kind of yeast which passes from the 

 intestinal canal into the body-cavity, the leucocytes attacked and devoured 

 the conidia. If a conidium were too much for one cell, a plasmodium, or 

 compound giant-cell, was formed to repel the invader. The same thing occurs 

 in anthrax, the bacilli being attacked and devoured by the leucocytes. " If 

 we summarize," says Mr. Bland Sutton ("General Pathology," pp. 127, 128), 

 " the story of inflammation as we read it zoologically, it should be likened to 

 a battle. The leucocytes are the defending army, their roads and lines of 

 communication the blood-vessels. Every composite organism maintains a 

 certain proportion of leucocytes as representing its standing army. When the 

 body is invaded by bacilli, bacteria, micrococci, chemical or other irritants, 

 information of the aggression is telegraphed by means of the vaso-motor 

 nerves, and leucocytes rush to the attack ; reinforcements and recruits are 

 quickly formed to increase the standing army, sometimes twenty, thirty, or 

 forty times the normal standard. In the conflict, cells die and often are 

 eaten by their companions ; frequently the slaughter is so great that the 

 tissue becomes burdened by the dead bodies of the soldiers in the form of 

 pus, the activity of the cell being testified by the fact that its protoplasm 

 often contains bacilli, etc., in various stages of destruction. These dead cells, 

 like the corpses of soldiers who fall in battle, later become hurtful to the 

 organism they were in their lifetime anxious to protect from harm, for they 



