Nor is this all. We should have to ask ourselves how casual actions, to which the insect was not predisposed by nature, can become the source of a hereditary transmissible habit. We should look upon a man as a sorry wag who came to us and said that the descendant of the desnucador knows the art of slaughtering cattle from A to Z merely through being the son of his father, without the aid of precept or example. The father does not use his blade just once or twice, by accident; he operates every day and scores of times a day; he goes to work with reflection. It is his business. Does this lifelong practice create a transmissible habit? Are the sons, the grandsons, the great-grandsons any the wiser, without instruction? No, the thing has to start afresh each time. Man is not predisposed by nature to this butchery. If, on her side, the Wasp excels in her art, it is because she is born to follow it, because she is endowed not only with tools, but also with the knack of using them. And this gift is original, perfect from the outset: the past has added nothing to it, the future will add nothing to it. As it was, so it is and will be. If you see in it naught but an acquired habit, which heredity hands down and improves, at least explain to us why man, who represents the highest stage in the evolution of your primitive plasma, is deprived of the like privilege. A paltry insect bequeaths its skill to its offspring; and man cannot. What an immense advantage it would be to humanity if we were less liable to see the worker succeeded by the idler, the man of talent by the idiot! Ah, why has not protoplasm, evolving by its own energy from one being into another, reserved until it came to us a little of that wonderful power which it has bestowed so lavishly upon the insects! The answer is that apparently, in this world, cellular evolution is not everything. For these among many other reasons, I reject the modern theory of instinct. I see in it no more than an ingenious game in which the armchair naturalist, the man who shapes the world according to his whim, is able to take delight, but in which the observer, the man grappling with reality, fails to find a serious explanation of anything whatsoever that he sees. In my own surroundings, I notice that those who are most positive in the matter of these difficult questions are those who have seen the least. If they have seen nothing at all, they go to the length of rashness. The others, the timid ones, know more or less what they are talking about. And is it not the same outside my modest environment? APPENDIX The following Wasps appear to me to be new to our fauna. I give a description of each of them. A CERCERIS ANTONIÆ—H. FAB.