The soul’s instinct toward the immortal life is like the instinct of
these wasps:
Fabre, the wonderful French observer of wasps, experimented on
them in regard to the matter of finding and knowing their holes,
by carrying them away shut up in a dark box to the center of a
village three kilometers from the nesting-ground, and releasing
them after being kept all night in the dark boxes. These wasps
when released in the busy town, certainly a place never visited
by them before, immediately mounted vertically to above the
roofs and then instantly and energetically flew south, which was
the direction of their holes. Nine separate wasps, released one
at a time, did this without a moment’s hesitation, and the next
day Fabre found them all at work again at their hole-digging.
He knew them by two spots of white paint he had put on each
one.--VERNON L. KELLOGG, “Insect Stories.”
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