Now how many points are there in a Grey Worm, above and below? Mathematical accuracy would answer, an infinity; a few hundreds will serve our purpose. Of this number, nine or perhaps more have to be selected; the needle must be inserted there and not elsewhere: a little higher, a little lower, a little to one side, it would not produce the desired effect. If the favourable event is a purely accidental result, how many combinations would be needed to bring it about, how much time to exhaust all the possible cases? When the difficulty becomes too pressing, you take refuge behind the mist of the ages; you retreat into the shadows of the past as far as fancy can carry you; you call upon time, that factor of which we have so little at our disposal and which, for this very reason, is so well suited to hide our illusions. Here you can let yourselves go and lavish the centuries. Suppose we shake up hundreds of figures, all of different values, in an urn and draw nine at random. When shall we, in this way, obtain a sequence fixed beforehand, a sequence that stands alone? The chance is so slight, answers mathematics, that we may as well put it down as nil and say that the desired arrangement will never come about. For the Ammophila of the prehistoric age, the attempt was renewed only at long intervals, from one year to the next. Then how did this sequence of nine stings at nine selected points emerge from the urn of chance? When I am driven to appeal to infinity in time, I am very much afraid of running up against absurdity. ‘But,’ say you, ‘the insect did not attain its present surgical dexterity at the outset: it went through experiments, apprenticeships, varying degrees of skill. There was a weeding-out by natural selection, eliminating the less expert, retaining the more gifted; and instinct, as we know it, developed gradually, thanks to the accumulation of individual capacities, added to those handed down by heredity.’