accomplish the final act of its metamorphosis, i.e. issuing from the cocoon or cell. Its mandibles furnish it with scissors, file, pick, and lever to cut, gnaw, and pull down not only its cocoon and wall of mortar, but any other barrier not too tenacious which may be substituted for the natural wall of its nest. Moreover,—and this is a chief condition, without which its outfit would be useless,—there is, I will not say the will to use these tools, but an inward stimulus inviting it to employ them. The hour to come forth having arrived, this stimulus awakens, and the insect sets to work to bore a passage. In that case it matters little whether the material to be pierced is natural mortar, Sorghum pith, or paper. The imprisoning cover will not resist long. It even matters little if the obstacle be thickened and a paper barrier be added to the earthen one. Both count as one if there be no interval between them, and the insect passes through them because this coming forth seems to it a single action. With the paper cone, whose wall is at a short distance, the conditions are changed, although the total thickness of barrier is really the same. The insect has done all that it was destined to do in order to free itself. To move freely on the mortar dome means to it that deliverance is achieved. It has bored its way out; the work is accomplished. But round the nest another barrier presents itself—the paper wall. To pierce through, the action already accomplished must be repeated—that action which the insect has to perform but once in its life. It must double that which naturally is but single; and it cannot, simply because it has not the will to do it. It perishes for lack of the smallest ray of intelligence. Yet in this singular intellect it is the fashion nowadays to see a rudiment of human reason! The fashion will pass and the facts remain, bringing us back to the good old ideas of the soul and its immortal destinies. Réaumur relates, too, how his friend Du Hamel, having seized a mason bee with his pincers when it had entered half-way into its cell, head first, to fill it with bee-bread, carried it into a room at a considerable distance from the spot where he caught it. The bee escaped and flew through the window. Du Hamel immediately returned to the nest. The mason bee reached it almost at the same time, and resumed work. It only seemed a little wilder, says the narrator.