Note 1 — IX ADVANCED THEORIES

Here should be interpolated a certain passage from Lacordaire’s Introduction to Entomology,1 against which I long to raise my voice in protest. Here it is: “Darwin, who has written a book on purpose to prove the identity of the intellectual principle which produces action in man and animals, walking one day in his garden noticed on the ground in a shady walk a Sphex which had just caught a fly nearly as big as itself. He saw it cut off with its mandibles the victim’s head and abdomen, keeping only the thorax, to which the wings remained attached. It then flew away, but a breath of wind striking the fly’s wings twirled the Sphex round, and hindered its progress. Thereupon it lit again on the walk, cut off first one wing and then the other from the fly, and having thus removed the cause of its difficulties, flew off with the remainder of its prey. This fact indicates manifest signs of reasoning. Instinct might have induced the Sphex to cut off the wings of its victim before transporting it to the nest, as do some species of the same genus, but here were consecutive ideas and results of those ideas quite inexplicable, unless one admits the intervention of reason.”