INSECT PSYCHOLOGY.*
IT is almost inevitable that one should compare a new book dealing with insects with the work of the great Fabre, and:it is almost as inevitable that, from the literary and human point of
view, it should be unequal to the comparison. But every poet cannot be a Shakespeare and M. Bouvier's book, if it has not the fascination of Fabre's work, is a very interesting production. For the reader who is not a specialist on the subject such books are, as a rule, more interesting in their account of obser- vations and experiments than in the conclusions and theories
which are drawn from them. And, from every aspect, many of these conclusions and theories, however they may appear to tally with the facts observed, are probleniatical ; for willy-nilly the human point of view cannot be excluded. M. Bouvier is thoroughly aware of the dangers of anaropocentrism—that impressive word whose meaning may be expressed (if we may reverse Burns's famous phrase) as " seeing others as we see ourselves." " Animal psychology," he says, " is a very delioate science, because more than any other it risks the confounding of the objective with the subjective. The intimate phenomena of animal behaviour escape direct observa- tion, and it is only from the manner in which they manifest themselves that we are able to understand them. Then comes in the personal judgment of the observer, and two things present themselves : on the one hand, reasoning by analogy it gives the animals human faculties (anthropocentrism) ; on the other, it shows an excessive tendency to follow from the bottom to the top the stair of living beings and to reduce all animal activities of the lower organisms to purely mechanical manifestations."
But even when the observer is awake to these dangers it is
• The Psychic Life of Insect.. By E. L. Bouvier. London: Fisher Unwin Ida.
impossible for him to avoid them completely, simply because it is not possible for man to escape from the human point of view. The emotional and intellectual structure of the human mind is the only apparatus through which he can envisage the world, to try to assume a non-human point of view would be to try to look through a microscope which could not be focused.
The earlier part of the present book deals with tropisms. Tropism is another impressive word, meaning simply a turning, and so a turning to or from an influence such as light, heat, gravity, moisture. Among a variety of tropisms, phototropism— a response to the influence of light—is one of the most striking :- "Organisms respond automatically to the luminous stimulus with an orientation and with determined movements. Whether they are provided with eyes or not, they react the same, and this reaction is not the result of sight, but a response of the living material, the protoplasm which constitutes them, to the energy of the luminous rays."
Everyone knows that moths are attracted to a light and sun- flowers to the sun, but most of us, though we may consider the turning of the sunflower to the sun to be automatic, are apt to regard " the desire of the moth for the star " as a sentimental idiosyncrasy and not, as it really is, an automatic response to stimulus.
Having dealt, as a basis for his subject, with tropisms (which appear in the lowest and highest animals and also in plants), M. Bouvier goes on to the subject of memory—both species- memory and individual memory—which constitutes a change from automatism to psychism. Species-memory is the result of impressions which in the course of ages have been engraved upon the brain centres as a result of stimuli; it is an original psychism which has become automatism. Individual memory is more extensive and more flexible than the species-memory ; it is the personal adaptation of the individual to the world in which it finds itself. M. Bouvier gives many interesting instances of how insects will, if their customary habits and circumstances are interfered with, adapt themselves to new conditions.
Throughout the book M. Bouvier follows the excellent plan of giving not merely the dry generalizations resulting from observed facts, but a whole series of interesting examples which led to those generalizations of the behaviour of insects under a variety of circumstances. For this reason his book is much more than a scientific treatise : it is a curious and delightful study of Nature.
Perhaps the most interesting chapters in the book are those on " Insects and Flowers " and " The Faculty of Orientation." Fabre held that insects have a special directive sense which enables them to find their way to places more or lees distant. IL Bouvier proves, we think conclusively, that this sense is nothing more mysterious than an excellent visual memory, aided sometimes by an olfactory memory. The experiments by which he and other naturalists arrived at this conclusion make very attractive reading.
Dr. L. 0. Howard's translation of the book is not always perfect ; he occasionally takes over French idioms and even a. few French words, and there are signs here and there of careless proof-reading, but the intended meaning is very seldom doubtful and this, in a translation, is no inconsiderable merit.
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