24 AUGUST 1878, Page 3

In the course of his lecture Mr. Romanes remarked that

insects are usually "more intelligent than many of the lower vertebrate," for the experiment of Professor Mobitus proved that "a pike requires three months to learn the position of a sheet of glass in its tank, and when once the association is established, it is never again disestablished, even though the sheet of glass be taken away." Perhaps, by the way, Professor Mobius had got hold of an idiot among pikes ; (did not Sir John Lubbock find a good many such idiots among bees, which could not find their way out of a glass tumbler, with its closed end turned towards the light?) and certainly it does not seem to us that these naturalist experi- menters have ever taken sufficiently into account the possibility of individual differences between creatures of the same species. But Mr. Romanes told the story of the poor pike only to point a sarcasm.