"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.)