Chapter 9

"The Spirit Bloweth Whither it Listeth."

What is this instinct, which guides the insect to such marvellous results? Is it merely a degree of intelligence, or some absolutely different form of activity?

Is it possible, by studying the habits of animals, to discover some of those elementary springs of action whose knowledge would enable us to dive more deeply into our own natures?

Fabre has presented us to his Sphex, the "infallible paralyser." Are we to credit her not only with memory, but also with the faculty of associating ideas, of judgment, and of pursuing a train of reasoning in respect of her astonishingly co-ordinated actions?

Put to the question by the malice of the operator, the "transcendent" anatomist trips over a mere trifle, and the slightest novelty confounds her.

Without the circle of her ordinary habits, what stupidity, "what darkness wraps her round"! She retreats; she refuses to understand; "she washes her eyes, first passing her hands across her mouth; she assumes a dreamy, meditative air." What can she be pondering? Under what form of thought, illusion, or mirage does the unfamiliar problem which has obtruded itself into her customary life present itself behind those faceted eyes? (8/1.)

How can we tell? We can only attain to knowledge of ourselves by direct intuition. It is only the idea of our ego which enables us to conjecture what is passing in the brains of our fellows. Between the insect and ourselves no understanding is possible, so remote are the analogies between its organization and our own; and we can only form idle hypotheses as to its states of consciousness and the real motive of its actions.

Consider only that unknown and mysterious energy which the insects display in their operations and their labours, as it is in itself, and let us content ourselves, first of all, with comparing it to our own intelligence, such as we conceive it to be.

In seeking to appreciate whereby it differs perhaps we shall gain more than by vainly seeking points of resemblance. We shall discover, in fact, behind the insect and its prodigious instincts, a vast and remote horizon, a region at once more profound, more extensive, and more fruitful than that of the intelligence; and if Fabre is able to help us to decipher a few pages of "the most difficult of all volumes, the book of ourselves," it is precisely, as a philosopher told him, because "man has remained instinctive in process of becoming intelligent." (8/2.)

The work of Fabre is from this point of view an invaluable treasury of observations and experiments, and the richest contribution which has ever been made to the study of these fascinating problems.

"The function of the intelligence is to reflect, to be conscious; that is, to relate the effect to its cause, to add a "because" to a "why"; to remedy the accidental; to adapt a new course of conduct to new circumstances."

In relation to the human intelligence thus defined Fabre has considered these nervous aptitudes, so well adjusted, according to the evolutionists, by ancient habit, that they have finally become impulsive and unconscious, and, properly speaking, innate. He has demonstrated, with an abundance of proof and a power of argument that we must admire, the blind mechanism which determines all the manifestations, even the most extraordinary, of that which we call instinct, and which heredity has fixed in a species of unchangeable automatism, like the rhythm of the heart and the lungs. (8/3.)

Let us, from this wealth of material, from among the most suggestive examples, select some of his most striking demonstrations, which are classics of their kind.

Fabre has not attempted to define instinct, for it is indefinable; nor to probe its essential nature, which is impenetrable. But to recognize the order of nature is in itself a sufficiently fascinating study, without striving to crack an unbreakable bone or wasting time in pondering insoluble enigmas. The important matter is to avoid the introduction of illusions, to beware of exceeding the data of observation and experiment, of substituting our own inferences for the facts, of outstripping reality and amplifying the marvellous.

Let us listen to the scrupulous analysis whose lessons, scattered through four thousand pages, teach us more concerning instinct and its innumerable variations than all the most learned treatises and speculations of the philosophers.

Nothing in the world perplexes the mind of the observer like the spectacle of the birth and growth of the instincts.

At precisely the right moment, just as failure or disaster seems foreordained by the previously established circumstances, Fabre shows us his insects as suddenly mastered by an irresistible force.

"At the right moment" they invincibly obey some sort of mysterious and inflexible prescription. Without apprenticeship, they perform the very actions required, and blindly accomplish their destiny.

Then, the moment having passed, the instincts "disappear and do not reawaken. A few days more or less modify the talents, and what the young insect knew the adult has often forgotten." (8/4.)

Among the Lycosae, at the moment of exodus, a sudden instinct is evolved which a few hours later disappears never to return. It is the climbing instinct, unknown to the adult spider, and soon forgotten by the emancipated young, who are destined to roam upon the face of the earth. But the young Lycosae, anxious to leave the maternal home and to travel, become suddenly ardent climbers and aeronauts, each releasing a long, light thread which serves it as parachute. The voyage accomplished, no trace of this ingenuity is left. Suddenly acquired, the climbing instinct no less suddenly disappears. (8/5.)

The great historiographer of instinct has thrown a wonderful light, by his beautiful experiments relating to the nidification of the mason-bee, upon the indissoluble succession of its different phases; the lineal concatenation, the inevitable and necessary order which presides over each of these nervous discharges of which the total series constitutes, properly speaking, a mode of action.

The mason-bee continues to build upon the ready-completed nest presented to her. She obstinately insists upon provisioning a cell already duly filled with the quantity of honey required by the larva, because, in this case as in the other, the impulse which incites her to build or to provision the nest has not yet been exhausted.

On the other hand, if we empty the little cup of its contents when she has filled it she will not recommence her labours. "The process of provisioning being complete, the secret impulse which urged her to collect her honey is no longer active. The insect therefore ceases to store her honey, and, in spite of this accident, lays her egg in the empty cell, thus leaving the future nursling without nourishment." (8/6.)

In the case of the Pelopaeus, Fabre calls our attention to one of the most instructive physiological spectacles that can be imagined.

While the mason-bee does not notice that her cell has been emptied, the Pelopaeus cannot perceive that the tricks of the experimenter have resulted in the disappearance of her progeny; and she "continues to store away spiders for a germ that no longer exists; she perseveres untiringly in her useless hunting, as though the future of her larva depended on it; she amasses provisions which will feed no one; more, she pushes aberration to the extent of plastering even the place where her nest was if we remove it, giving the last strokes of the trowel to an imaginary building, and putting her seals upon empty nothing." (8/7.)

>From these facts, and others, no less celebrated, which show "the inability of insects to escape from the routine of their customs and their habitual labours," Fabre derives so many proofs of their lack of intelligence.

The Epeïra fasciata is incapable of replacing a single radial thread in the geometrical structure of its web, when broken; it recommences the entire web every evening, and weaves it at one stretch with the most beautiful mastery, as though merely amusing itself.

The caterpillar of the Greater Peacock moth teaches us the same lesson; when occupied in weaving its cocoon it does not know how to repair an artificial rent; and "in spite of the certainty of its death, or rather that of the future butterfly, it quietly continues to spin, without troubling to cover the rent; devoting itself to a superfluous task, and ignoring the treacherous breach, which leaves the cocoon and its inhabitant at the mercy of the first thief that finds it." (8/8.)

Thus "because one action has just been performed, another must inevitably be performed to complete the first; what is done is done, and is never repeated. Like the watercourse, which cannot climb the hills and return to its source, the insect does not retrace its steps or repeat its actions, which follow one another invariably, and are inevitably connected in a necessary order, like a series of echoes, one of which awakens another...The insect knows nothing of its marvellous talents, just as the stomach knows nothing of its cunning chemistry. It builds like a bricklayer, weaves, hunts, stabs, and paralyses, as it secretes the venom of its weapons, the silk of its cocoon, the wax of its comb, or the threads of its web; always without the slightest knowledge of the means and the end." (8/9.)

Thus instinct is one thing and intelligence is another; and for Fabre there is no transition which can transform the one into the other.

But how profound and abundant, how infinite is the source from which this manifold activity derives, distributed as it is throughout the entire animal kingdom; and which in ourselves commands the profoundest part of our nature; unconscious, or even in opposition to our wonderful intelligence, which it often silences or altogether overwhelms.

Although the insect "has no need of lessons from its elders" in order to accomplish its beautiful masterpieces, the comprehensive concept of the genius which rises spontaneously and at a single step to the loftiest conceptions is not always a product of pure reason.

Compare the sublime logic of animal maternity, the impeccable dictates of instinct, with the hesitations, the gropings, the uncertainties, the errors and tragic failures of human maternity, when it seeks to replace the unerring commands of instinct by the clumsy efforts of the intelligence!

If all is darkness to the animal, apart from its habitual paths, how feeble and hesitating, how faltering and unequal is reason when it seeks to oppose its laborious inductions to the infallible wisdom of the unconscious!

It is, in fact, to this concatenation of actions, narrowly connected by a mutual dependence, that we owe this inexhaustible series of cunning industries and wonderful arts. To Fabre they are so many feats of a learned unconsciousness.

"See the nest, the accustomed masterpiece of mothers; it is more often than otherwise an animal fruit, a coffer full of germs, containing eggs in place of seeds."

The satin bag of the Epeïra fasciata, in which her eggs are enclosed, "breaks at the caress of the sun, like the skin of an over-ripe pomegranate."

The Dorthesia, the louse inhabiting the euphorbia, "trebles the length of her body, prolonging its hinder part into a pouch, comparable to that of the opossum, into which the eggs are dropped, and in which the young are hatched, to leave it afterwards at will." (8/10.)

The Chermes of the ilex "hardens into a rampart of ebony, whence an innumerable legion of vermin bursts forth one day without changing their place."

The capsule of gold-beater's skin, in which the grubs of the Cione are enclosed, divides itself, at the moment of liberation, into two hemispheres "of a regularity so perfect that they recall exactly the bursting of the pyxidium when the seed is distributed." (8/11.)

Here and there, however, we catch a glimpse of a rudiment of what we understand by consciousness, in the shape of a "vague discrimination."

Each plant has its lover, drawn to it by a kind of elective affinity and invariable tendency. The Larra makes for the thistle, the Vanessa for the nettle, the Clytus for the ilex, and the Crioceris for the lily. "The weevil knows nothing but its peas and beans, the golden Rhynchites only the sloe, and the Balaninus only the nut or acorn."

But the Pieris, which haunts the cabbage, frequents the nasturtium also, and the golden rose-beetle, which "intoxicates itself at the clusters of the hawthorn," is no less addicted to the nectar of the rose.

The Xylocopa, which burrows in the trunks of trees and old rafters, forming little round corridors in which to lodge her offspring, "will utilize artificial galleries which she has not herself bored."

The Chalicodoma "also is aware of the economic advantages of an old abandoned nest"; the Anthophora is careful to establish her family "at the least expense," and profits on occasion by galleries which have been mined by previous generations; adapting herself to these new conditions, she repairs the tunnels which she did not construct "and economizes her forces." (8/12.)

It would seem, therefore, that these tiny minds are created and shaped by means of experience; they recognize "that which is most fitting"; they learn, they compare; may we not also say that they judge?

Does not the Mason-bee, "which rakes the roads for a dry powdery dust and mixes it with saliva to convert it into a hard cement," foresee that this mud will harden?

Is the Pelopaeus devoid of judgment when she seeks the interior of dwelling-houses in order to shelter her nest of dried clay, which the least drop of rain would reduce to its original state of mud?

Is it without knowledge of the effects that the sloe-weevil builds a ventilating chimney to prevent the asphyxiation of her larva? that the Scarabaeus sacer contrives a filter at the smaller end of its pear-shaped ball, by means of which the grub is able to breathe? or that Arachne labyrintha "introduces in her silk-work a rampart of compressed earth to protect her eggs from the probe of the Ichneumon"?

May we not also see a masterpiece of the highest logic in the house of the trap-door spider, Arachne clotho, which is furnished with a door, a true door "which she throws open with a push of the leg, and carefully bolts behind her on returning by means of a little silk"? (8/13.)

What a miracle of invention too is the prodigious nest of the Eumenes, "with its egg suspended by a thread from the roof, like a pendulum, oscillating at the lightest breath in order to save it from contact with the caterpillars, which, incompletely paralysed, are wriggling and writhing below"! Later, when the egg is hatched, "the filament is transformed into a tube, a place of refuge, up which the grub clambers backwards. At the least sign of danger from the mass of caterpillars the larva retreats into its sheath and ascends to the roof, where the wriggling swarm cannot reach it." (8/14.)

Let us refer also to the remarkable history of the Copris. We cannot deny that the valiant dung-beetle is capable of "evading the accidental" (which to Fabre constitutes one of the distinctive characteristics of the intelligence), since it immediately intervenes if with the point of a penknife we open the roof of its nest and lay bare its egg. "The fragments raised by the knife are immediately brought together and soldered, so that no trace is left of the injury, and all is once more in order." We may read also with what incredible address the mother Copris was able to use and to profit by the ready-made pellets of cow-dung which it occurred to Fabre to offer her. (8/15.)

But their scope is limited, and encroaches very little, in the eyes of the great observer, on the domain of intelligence. This he demonstrates to satiety, and his astonishing Necrophori, which adapt themselves so admirably to circumstances and triumph over the experimental difficulties to which he subjects them, seem scarcely to exceed the limits of those actions which at bottom are merely unconscious. (8/16.)

With the spawning of the Osmia, Fabre throws a fresh and unexpected light on the intuitive knowledge of instinct.

We are still groping our way among the causes which rule the determination of the sexes. Biology has only been able to throw a few scattered lights on the subject, and we possess only a few approximate data; which nevertheless are turned to account by the breeders of insects. We are still in the region of illusion and imperfect prognostics.

But the Osmia knows what we do not. She is deeply versed in all physiological and anatomical knowledge, and in the faculty of creating children of either sex at will.

These pretty bees, "with coppery skin and fleece of ruddy velvet," which establish their progeny in the hollow of a bramble stump, the cavity of a reed, or the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell, know the fixed and immutable genetic laws which we can only guess at, and are never mistaken.

This marvellous prerogative the Osmia shares with a host of apiaries, in which the unequal development of the males and females requires an unequal provision of space and of nourishment for the future larvae. For the females, who exceed in point of size, huge cells and abundant provision; for the more puny males, narrow cells and a smaller ration of pollen and honey.

Now the circumstances which are encountered by the Osmia, when, pressed by the necessities of spawning, she searches for a dwelling, are often fortuitous and incapable of modification; and in order to give each set of larvae the necessary space "she lays at will a male or a female egg, according to the conditions of space."

In this marvellous study, which constitutes, with the history of the Cerceris, the finest masterpiece of experimental entomology, Fabre brilliantly establishes all the details of that curious law which in the Hymenoptera rules both the distribution and the succession of the sexes. In his artificial hives, in glass cylinders, he forces the Osmia to commence her spawning with the males, instead of beginning with the females as nature requires, since the insect is primarily preoccupied with the more important sex, that which ensures par excellence the perpetuation of the species. He even forces the whole swarm which buzzes about his work-tables, his books, his bottles, and apparatus, completely to change the order of its spawning. He shows finally that in the heart of the ovaries the egg of the Osmia has as yet no determined sex, and that it is only at the precise moment when the egg is on the point of emerging from the oviduct that it receives, AT THE WILL OF THE MOTHER, the mysterious, final, and inevitable imprint.

But whence does the Osmia derive this, "distinct idea of the invisible"? Here again is one of those riddles of nature which Fabre declares himself quite incapable of solving. (8/17.)

Is this all? No; we are far from having made the tour of this miraculous and incommensurable kingdom through which this admirable master leads us, and I should never be done were I to attempt to exhaust all the spectacles which he offers us. Let us descend yet another step, among creatures yet smaller and humbler. We shall find tendencies, impulses, preferences, efforts, intentions, "Machiavellic ruses and unheard-of stratagems."

Certain miserable black mites, living specks, the larvae of a beetle, one of the Meloidae, the Sitaris, are parasites of the solitary bee, the Anthophora. They wait patiently all the winter at the entrance of her tunnel, on the slope of a sunny bank, for the springtime emergence of the young bees, as yet imprisoned in their cells of clay. A male Anthophora, hatched a little earlier than the females, appears in the entrance of the tunnel; these mites, which are armed with robust talons, rouse themselves, hasten to and fro, hook themselves to his fleece, and accompany him in all his peregrinations; but they quickly recognize their error; for these animated specks are well aware that the males, occupied all day long in scouring the country and pillaging the flowers, live exclusively out of doors, and would in no wise serve their end. But the moment comes when the Anthophora pays court to the fair sex, and the imperceptible creature immediately profits by the amorous encounter to change its winged courser. "These pigmies therefore have a memory, an experience of facts" (and how one is tempted to add, a glimmering of intelligence!). Grappled now to the female bee, the grub of the Sitaris "conceals itself, and allows itself to be carried by her" to the end of the gallery in which she is now contriving her cradle, "watches the precise moment when the egg is laid, installs itself upon it, and allows itself to fall therewith upon the surface of the honey, in order to substitute itself for the future offspring of the Anthophora, and possess itself of house and victuals." (8/18.)

Another "little gelatinous speck," "a shadow of a creature," the larva of a Chalcidian, the Leucopsis, one of the parasites of the Mason-bee, knows that in the cell of the mason there is food for one only. Scarcely has it entered the tiny dwelling but we see this "nameless shape" for several days "anxiously wandering; it visits the top and bottom, the back, the front, the sides"; it makes the tour of its domain; "it searches in the darkness, palpitating, seemingly with an object in view." What does this "animated globule" want? why is this atom so excited? It is searching to discover if there is not in some corner hitherto unexplored another larva, a rival, that it may exterminate it! (8/19.)

What then intrinsically is instinct? And what intrinsically is intelligence?

How can we propose to draw up the inexhaustible inventory of all the manifestations of life, and why attempt to include all its species and their unknown varieties in narrow classes? Why say that there are only two modes of life, instinct on the one hand and intelligence on the other, "when we know how subtle and illusive is this Proteus, and that there are not two things only, but a thousand dissimilar things" (8/20.): or rather is it not always the same thing, everywhere present and acting in living matter, and susceptible of infinite degrees, under forms and disguises innumerable?

This is why it escapes the "scalpel of the masters" and the apparatus of the chemists. We may dissect, we may scrutinize organs under the magnifying glass, examine wing-cases, count the nervures of the wings, the number of articulations in the limbs; we may reckon every point, like Réaumur forgetting not a line, not a hair; we may compare and measure every portion of the mouth, and define the class; and we shall not find a single point in all this physical architecture which will positively inform us of the habits of the insect. Of what account are a few slight differences? It is in the physical far more than in the anatomical differences that the inviolable demarcation between two species exists. Instincts dominate forms; the tool does not make the artisan; "and none of these various structures, however well adapted they may appear to us, bears within it its reason or its finality."

Thus whatever opinion we may hold as to the nature of instinct, the accomplishments and habits of insects are not, properly speaking, connected with the external and visible form of their organs, and their acts do not necessarily presuppose the instruments which would be appropriate to them.

We know that with most organisms, and particularly with plants, an almost imperceptible variation in material circumstances is often enough to modify their character and to produce fresh aptitudes. Nevertheless, we can but wonder, with Fabre, that physical modifications, which, when they do exist, are so slight always as to have escaped the most perfect observation, should have sufficed to determine the appearance of profoundly dissimilar faculties. Inexplicable abilities, unexpected habits, unforeseen physical aptitudes, and unheard-of industries are exercised by means of organs which are here and there practically identical. "The same tools are equally good for any purpose. Talent alone is able to adapt them to manifold ends."

The Anthidia have two particular industries; "those which felt cotton and card the soft down of hairy plants have the same claws, the same mandibles, composed of the same portions as those which knead resin and mix it with fine gravel." (8/21.)

The sloe-weevil "bores the hard stone of the sloe with the same rostrum as that which its congeners, so like it in conformation, employ to roll the leaves of the vine and the poplar into tiny cigars."

The implement of the Megachile, the rose-fly, is by no means appropriate to its industry; "yet the perfectly circular fragments of leaves have the precise perfection of form that a punch would give."

The Xylocopa, in order to pierce wood and to bore its galleries in an old rafter, employs "the same utensils which in others are transformed into picks and mattocks to attack clay and gravel, and it is only a predisposition of talent that holds each worker to his speciality."

Moreover, have not the superior animals the same senses and the same structure, yet what inequality there is among them, in the matter of aptitudes and degrees of intelligence!

Habits are no more determined by anatomical peculiarities than are aptitudes or industries.

The two Goat-moth caterpillars, of similar structure, have entirely different stomachic aptitudes; "the exclusive portion of the one is the oak and of the other the hawthorn or the cherry-laurel."

"Whence does the Mantis derive its excessive hunger, its pugnacity, its cannibalism, and the Empusa its sobriety, its peaceableness, when their almost identical organization would seem to indicate an identity of needs, instincts, and habits?"

In the same way the black scorpion appears to present none of the interesting peculiarities which we observe in the habits of its congener, the white scorpion of Languedoc. (8/22.)

Structure, therefore, tells us nothing of aptitude; the organ does not explain its function. Let the specialists hypnotize themselves over their lenses and microscopes; they may accumulate at leisure masses of details relating to this or that family or genus or individual; they may undertake the most subtle inquiries, may write thousands and thousands of pages in order to detail a few slight variations, without even succeeding in exhausting the matter: they will not even have seen what is most wonderful.

When the little insect has for the last time cleaned its claws, the secret of the little mind has fled for ever, with all the feelings that animated it and gave it life. That which is crystallized in death cannot explain what was life. This is the thought which the Provençal singer, with that intuition which is the privilege of genius, has expressed in these melodious lines:

"Oh! pau de sèn qu'emé l'escaupre Furnant la mort, creson de saupre, La vertu de l'abiho e lou secrèt doù méu."

(O men of little sense, who seek, Scalpel in hand, to make Death tell The virtue of the bee, the secret of her cell!) (8/23.)