Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/39

Rh out his experiments the mistral was blowing hard from the north, and as nevertheless males arrived, they must all have come with the wind ; no moth ever hatched could beat up against the mistral. But then, if the guide is an odour, the wind, blowing it to the south, would have prevented it ever reaching the males ! Here, then, we have a circumstance which leaves us groping for an explanation.

In watching the behaviour of the third moth on his list, the Banded Monk, on the other hand, Fabre discerned a circumstance very strongly suggestive of the operation of an odorous lure. He found that, if the female was left for a time in contact with some absorbent material and was afterwards shifted, the males were attractcd, not to her new situation, but to the place where she had originally been lying. Subsequent experiment showed that a period of about half an hour was necessary to lead to the impregnation of the neighbourhood with the effluvium she elaborated.

The obvious test was employed of trying to drown the supposed odour of the female by filling the room she was in with powerful aromas, like naphthaline, paraffin, the alkaline sulphides, and the like. But in spite of the presence of these stenches, in our experience overwhelming to fainter exhalations, the males still continued to arrive in droves. This result led Fabre to doubt