Another indication of sensory control is found in the repair-work
performed by animals endowed with the constructive instinct. C. F.
Schroeder, for instance, experimenting on certain caterpillars, found
that they repaired their weaving, whenever it was disturbed by the
experimenter. Fabre, too, discovered that a Mason-bee would plaster
up holes or clefts marring the integrity of its cell, provided that
the bee was actually engaged in the process of plastering at the time,
and provided that the experimenter inflicted the damage at the level,
and within the area, of the construction work on which the bee was
then engaged. In a word, if the damage inflicted could be repaired by
a simple continuation or extension of its actual work of the moment,
the bee was able to cope with the emergency. There are other ways,
too, in which the animal adapts its constructive instincts to external
circumstance. Fabre tells us that the Bramble-bee _Osmia_, which builds
a train of partitioned cells in snail shells or in hollow reeds, will
victual first and then plaster in a partition, if the reed be narrow,
but will first plaster a partition, and then introduce honey and
pollen through a hole left unclosed in the partition, whenever the
reed is of greater diameter. This reversal of the procedure according
to the exigencies of the external situation does not suggest the
chain-reflex of Loeb. (Cf. “The Bramble-Bee,” pp. 214-217.) Another
kind of adaptation of instinct to external circumstances consists in
the economical omission of the initial step of a serial construction,
in cases where the environmental conditions provide a ready-made
equivalent. “The silkworm,” says Driesch, “is said not to form its
web of silk if it is cultivated in a box containing tulle, and some
species of bees which normally construct tunnels do not do so if they
find one ready made in the ground, they then only perform their second
instinctive act: separating the tunnel into single cells.” (“Science &
Phil. of the Organism,” vol. II, p. 47.)
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