166 LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. 
called the Hymenoptera, or membrane-winged insects 
(hymen, membrane ; pteron, wing), including the gall- 
flies, saw-flies, ichneumons, burrowers, bees, wasps, and 
ants, in which instinct and intelligence exists to such 
a great degree that all naturalists are lost in wonder 
at the ingenuity of the wasp or the bee, and the 
almost incredible sagacity of the ant. 
And here comes a curious fact which we find 
equally among the insects and the back-boned animals. 
As Life endows her children with more intelligence, 
with quicker brains governing active bodies, we find 
them becoming more and more dependent upon 
others in their infancy and youth. Just as the large 
and man-like orang-outang remains as helpless as a 
human baby for the first few months of its life, while 
the lower and less intelligent monkeys have, long 
before that age, begun to fight their own battles ;"' r so 
while the grubs of the frivolous butterfly, the thought- 
less gnat, and even the more intelligent saw-fly, are 
active and can take care of themselves from the time 
they come out of the egg, the cell-building bee and 
wasp on the contrary, and the thoughtful contriving 
ant, have a real babyhood, during which others watch 
and tend them, and when they must perish, just as 
a child would, if it were not for the care and atten- 
tion of their grown-up friends. And this helplessness 
of infancy increases with the intelligence of the 
grown-up creature, as we shall see on reading the 
next chapter. For no one will deny that the ant 
stands first in mental capacity among insects, and its 
* For an amusing account of the difference between an orang-outang 
baby and a young harelip monkey of about the same age, see Wallace's 
Malay Archipelago, p, 45. 
