The male stickleback searched for its nest in the old direction on the window side--that is to say, the same position in reference to the incidence of the light. The search was, of course, fruitless, and a new nest was begun in this position. Presently the old nest was discovered, and was then vigorously destroyed in just the same way as the nest of a rival is pulled to pieces and scattered. Here a new incidence of light and new direction of shadows seemed to have completely transformed the visual situation. To return to insects, it is probable that the homing faculty is not the result of an inborn mysterious instinct dependent on some sense of direction of which we have no knowledge, but is based upon experience gained during their flight hither and thither--that, in a word, it is intelligent and not instinctive. Experiments of Fabre at first seemed to suggest some magnetic influence to which bees were sensitive; for when a minute magnet was fixed to a bee as it started on its return journey, the insect was at fault; but as a check experiment he affixed a piece of straw instead of a magnet, with similar results. Some of Fabre’s observations and those of Dr. Bethe[55] are difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that, in the homing, guidance is due to acquired acquaintance with the locality. But, on the other hand, the experiments of Lord Avebury and of Romanes seem to favour this view. Romanes found that when bees were taken inland from their hive near the seaboard, and then liberated, they returned from considerable distances, the whole locality being familiar; but taken to the seashore, where the objects around them were unfamiliar (since the seashore is not the place where flowers and nectar are to be found), the bees, though not far distant from the hive, were nonplussed and lost their way. Dr. and Mrs. Peckham, as the result of their extremely careful observations, seem to have no doubt that the homing of solitary wasps is due to locality-experience; and of the social wasp, _Polistes fusca_, they say:[56] “We have seen the young workers make repeated locality studies when they first began to venture away from home, but as they occupy the same nest all summer they, of course, grow more and more familiar with their surroundings, until they become so thoroughly acquainted with them that they can find their way without the least difficulty. We have no doubt that with them, as with the solitary wasps, the faculty is not instinctive, but is the direct outcome of individual experience.”