I shall not attempt to determine the point where intellect begins to dawn, nor to assign the boundary where instinct assumes the characteristics of reason. For it is no where more difficult to discriminate between the regular operation of implanted motives, and the result of acquired knowledge and habits, than in studying the phænomena presented by the bee. For the present therefore I must be allowed to regard the provinces of reason and instinct as undefinable; indeed it seems highly probable that our limited faculties may never enable us to acquire a knowledge of them. Still the facts which I have related, and those which I shall proceed to detail, afford such apparently strong evidences of a reasoning faculty, that without introducing that faculty as their source, I shall be at a loss to explain the phænomena. +Dr. Darwin+ in his _Zoonomia_, relates an anecdote of apparent ratiocination in a _wasp_, which had caught a fly nearly as large as itself. Kneeling down, the Doctor saw the wasp dissever the head and tail from the trunk of the fly, and attempt to soar with the latter: but finding when about two feet from the ground that the wings of the fly carried too much sail, and caused its prize and itself to be whirled about, by a little breeze that had arisen, it dropped upon the ground with its prey, and deliberately sawed off with its mandibles, first one wing and then the other: having thus removed these impediments to its progress, the wasp flew away with its booty, and experienced no further molestation from the wind. Some of the proceedings of bees in glass hives cannot be referred to their instinctive faculties,--glass being a substance which would never be presented to them in their natural state. "Having frequently observed," says +Dr. Evans+, "on the inside of my glass hives, prior to the formation of cells, a number of gluey spots ranged at regular distances, I supposed them at first to be intended as a kind of land-marks, pointing out the divisions of the future streets, &c. On re-examination, however, I found them evidently used as so many footstools on the slippery glass, each bee resting on one of these with its middle pair of legs, while the fore-claws were hooked with the hind ones of the next above; thus forming a _living_ ladder, by which the workers were enabled to reach the top, and pursue their favourite plan of commencing their combs there."