This is best shown by the fact that the instincts may lead their possessors astray, which always happens when an animal is transferred to an unnatural situation, to which its instincts are not adapted, so to speak. The mole-cricket, which is in the habit of escaping pursuit by burrowing in the earth, makes violent motions with the forelegs, even if it be placed upon a plate of glass into which it could not possibly burrow; an ant-lion (_Myrmeleo_), whose instinct impels it to bore into loose sand by pushing backwards with the abdomen, goes backwards on a plate of glass as soon as danger threatens, and endeavours, with the utmost exertions, to bore into it. It knows no other mode of flight, and its intellect is much too weak to suggest any novel mode. Even the mode of escape most universal among animals, that of simply running away, does not occur to it; it acts as it must in accordance with its inborn instinct; it cannot do otherwise. The change of instincts in the different stages of development of one and the same animal have always seemed to me very remarkable; for instance, the change of the food-instinct in the caterpillar and the butterfly, where the food-instinct is liberated in the caterpillar by the leaf of a particular plant, but in the butterfly by the sight and fragrance of a flower, the nectar of which it sucks. In this case everything is different in the two stages of development, the whole apparatus for seeking and taking food, as well as the nerve-mechanism which determines these modes of action. And how far apart often are the stimuli which liberate the instinct! The larva of the flower-visiting, honey-sucking _Eristalis tenax_ is the ugly, white, so-called rat-tailed larva, well described by Réaumur, which lives swimming in liquid manure, and feeds on that! What complete and far-reaching changes, not only in the visible structure, but also in the finer nervous mechanisms, which we cannot yet verify, must have taken place in the vicissitudes of time and circumstance during the life-history of this insect! [Illustration: FIG. 32. Metamorphosis of _Sitaris humeralis_, an oil-beetle, after Fabre. _a_, first larval form, much enlarged. _b_, second larval form. _c_, resting stage of this larva (so-called 'pseudo-pupa'). _d_, third larval form. _e_, pupa.]