But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free intelligence, give examples of human sagacity. We have seen these same mason bees and xylocopes and domestic bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a hole bored in wood, by artificial combs set ready to take their honey; the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds, in which they arrange a series of chambers, accommodated themselves under Fabre's guidance in glass tubes which permitted the great observer to know them intimately. Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelligent as a brain; these two extremes should correspond with very ancient and very recent habits. It is certainly but a relatively short time since the peasant's pruning-bill began preparing cut reeds for the osmie; before that time she constructed her nest, as she still does, in empty snail shells or in some natural cavity. They are very interesting these osmies, extremely active solitary bees; one sees them having exhausted their ovaries, but not their muscular force, building extra nests, provisioning them with honey, without having laid a single egg in them; they will even make and close them without honey, if they do not find more flowers, thus showing a real craziness for work, an authentic mania analogous to that which moves man to move pebbles, to smoke, to drink rather than remain immobile.[2] If the osmie lived longer, she might perhaps invent some game which, vain at the start, would end by becoming both a need and a benefit to the whole species. The theory which makes instinct a partial crystallization of intelligence is extremely seductive: I dare say we will have to accept it as true. Yet the contemplation of the insect world raises an enormous objection. In the course of his wonderful memoirs Fabre has formulated it ten times and with always fresh ingenuity. Here is the insect, nearly always born adult, and after the death of her parents, she has received from them neither direct education nor education by example, as do the young of birds or mammals. A hen teaches her chick to scratch for worms (it is true that she does not teach her ducklings to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our amusement), an osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet now osmies do exactly what their ancients have done. The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennæ, performs its toilet, opens its wings, flies off for life, moves without hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and flees the enemies of its race, makes love, and finally constructs a nest identical with the cradle from which it has emerged.[3]