INSTINCT AND HABIT. 
3 
the animals familiar to ns ? No answer can be easily given, for the 
senses, the instincts, the modes of expression of insects are so totally 
diverse from onr own that there is scarcely any point of contact. In 
the case of mammals, of birds and to some extent of reptiles, we have in 
the eyes, in the features and in the movements, a clue to their feelings, 
to the emotions that sway them, to the motives that guide their actions; 
in insects we have none, and the great index of insect feeling, the antenna, 
has no counterpart in higher animals, and conveys nothing to our un¬ 
informed brains. We can judge then only from the movements of in¬ 
sects, from their actions, and this is so extraordinarily meagre a clue that 
it is not surprising that even the greatest familiarity with the life of an 
insect inspires no feeling that one has to do with a live organism having 
feelings and passions, having motives and a will, but suggests that one 
has before one a beautiful machine, tuned to respond mechanically to 
certain outside stimuli, to answer to particular influences and to behave 
in all things as a perfect mechanical structure; even the highest, the 
social insects and the fossorial wasps, inspire no other feelings, give one 
no sense of any relations between the individual insects but those 
mechanical ones concerned with daily life, and leave one with the 
conviction that the mentality of the higher animals is wholly absent, 
that no smallest trace of the emotions, of the will, of the thought 
processes of ourselves or other mammals, have any part in the lives 
of insects. Yet there are events in the lives of insects which, for a 
brief moment, impress us with the conviction that individuality, emotion 
and feeling may play their part; and though we see this exceedingly seldom, 
the few suggestive phenomena may be sufficient to warrant the assump¬ 
tion that in ways we cannot comprehend, in channels that are beyond 
our ken, the living active insect is in touch with every other living insect 
in its environment, by mental and physical processes that make no out¬ 
ward sign, that may proceed independently of any external sense organ 
that we can see or study and which possibly pass from mind to mind 
with no outward physical action or movement ; what occurs when bees 
swarm, when locusts swarm, when the white ants emerge from the nest, 
when a stray bee from one nest enters another and is promptly attacked 
and killed ? Are these wholly due to reflex actions and mechanical 
instincts, or are they the product of an individual will and mind in each 
and every insect; a locust swarm may be the product of a blind impulse 
