Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/166

156 that have a measuring eye! Is there, then, so wide a distance between this power of eye and the sense of symmetry, which the lowest savage has who is sensitive to the harmony in the lines of a carving or a tattooing? Is it not simpler to suppose that the bee has something of the same sensibility, rather than a sort of mathematical instinct, such as is sometimes attributed to it? The whole cerebral physiology of insects remains to be created. While we are no further advanced, it is perhaps rash to allow much to their intellectual faculties, but it is certainly unreasonable to degrade them too much. And, besides, there is still in us that old sin of pride, on which Montaigne rallies us so delicately, just with respect to the reason of animals. He understood animals much better than Descartes; he loves them, he plays with his cat, and this intercourse enlightens him; he speaks with sound judgment of the too narrow share of intelligence allowed to animals by man, while he himself "goes soaring in imagination beyond the orbit of the moon."

As to the legionary ants, the connection of the successive phenomena serving to explain the appearance and development of their instinct was far more difficult to conceive. We might well have despaired of any reasonable deduction, had not certain facts, here and there in Nature, come to our aid and put us on the right track, by showing us elsewhere the same instinct, less developed, or modified in different ways. These observations, coördinated by Darwin, have been like flashes of light, and have allowed us to conceive the evolution of these singular habits in a manner at least plausible. Thus, it is not uncommon that certain ants, which do not usually take auxiliaries, carry away to their hills nymphæ that are found by chance in their neighborhood. It is not unlikely that some of these nymphæ may have happened to come out, and may have performed the functions of their special instinct in their adopted city. If, now, it is admitted that these services may be of some use to the hill, then it will thrive better, and afterward it may happen that the same chance captives and chance comings-out of nymphæ may be repeated. At last, the habit will be formed—then the instinct will supervene, of carrying off stolen nymphæ. At the same time the presence of these strangers will almost necessarily react upon the robber-ants. Their instincts and their organs will be simultaneously modified, always upon the same principle, in the direction most favorable to the special duty that they perform in the community. From step to step, by a succession of scarcely-perceptible modifications, accumulating through centuries and ages, we shall arrive at races of legionaries as dependent on their comrades' labors as the species studied by Peter Huber.

Each instinct that we study displays itself to us, in a manner, under an absolute form; we never see it change; therefore it is said to be unchangeable. This is the illusion common to all phenomena that are too slow for their progress to be measured by the life or the memory