Entomologists -- France -- Biography; Fabre, Jean-Henri, 1823-1915
Does not the Mason-bee, "which rakes the roads for a dry powdery dust and
mixes it with saliva to convert it into a hard cement," foresee that this
mud will harden?
Is the Pelopaeus devoid of judgment when she seeks the interior of
dwelling-houses in order to shelter her nest of dried clay, which the least
drop of rain would reduce to its original state of mud?
Is it without knowledge of the effects that the sloe-weevil builds a
ventilating chimney to prevent the asphyxiation of her larva? that the
Scarabaeus sacer contrives a filter at the smaller end of its pear-shaped
ball, by means of which the grub is able to breathe? or that Arachne
labyrintha "introduces in her silk-work a rampart of compressed earth to
protect her eggs from the probe of the Ichneumon"?
May we not also see a masterpiece of the highest logic in the house of the
trap-door spider, Arachne clotho, which is furnished with a door, a true
door "which she throws open with a push of the leg, and carefully bolts
behind her on returning by means of a little silk"? (8/13.)
What a miracle of invention too is the prodigious nest of the Eumenes,
"with its egg suspended by a thread from the roof, like a pendulum,
oscillating at the lightest breath in order to save it from contact with
the caterpillars, which, incompletely paralysed, are wriggling and writhing
below"! Later, when the egg is hatched, "the filament is transformed into a
tube, a place of refuge, up which the grub clambers backwards. At the least
sign of danger from the mass of caterpillars the larva retreats into its
sheath and ascends to the roof, where the wriggling swarm cannot reach it."
(8/14.)
Let us refer also to the remarkable history of the Copris. We cannot deny
that the valiant dung-beetle is capable of "evading the accidental" (which
to Fabre constitutes one of the distinctive characteristics of the
intelligence), since it immediately intervenes if with the point of a
penknife we open the roof of its nest and lay bare its egg. "The fragments
raised by the knife are immediately brought together and soldered, so that
no trace is left of the injury, and all is once more in order." We may read
also with what incredible address the mother Copris was able to use and to
profit by the ready-made pellets of cow-dung which it occurred to Fabre to
offer her. (8/15.)
But their scope is limited, and encroaches very little, in the eyes of the
great observer, on the domain of intelligence. This he demonstrates to
satiety, and his astonishing Necrophori, which adapt themselves so
admirably to circumstances and triumph over the experimental difficulties
to which he subjects them, seem scarcely to exceed the limits of those
actions which at bottom are merely unconscious. (8/16.)
With the spawning of the Osmia, Fabre throws a fresh and unexpected light
on the intuitive knowledge of instinct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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