INSECT LIFE.*

FABIUM is coming into a wider kingdom. His translators multiply. The first three chapters of this book are a new translation of three which have already appeared (thirteen years ago) in a volume entitled Insect life—the work of another translator, the author of Mademoiselle Mori. The title of the one volume might well have been given to the other, for The Mason Bees is not concerned only with bees ; it is a treatise on the instinct and psychology of insects, more particularly mason bees and red ants, and there is an interesting sidelight thrown on the homing instincts of these two in a chapter describing experiments with cats. In any case, however, a new translation is welcome. Fabre as a writer ranges wide ; he is the most patient and exact of observers, his phrases turn quickly with vigorous thrusts and surprises, he has a critical humour, and he is a poet, with a poet's vision and power of touching the thought and guessing the hope of other beings. And Mr. de Mattos has the true art of the translator; his pages are not merely construing, not the mere setting down of the sense and purport of Fabre's argument, but the separate quality and the idiom of the individual voice and brain.

No writer has described with a fresher zest than Fabre the beginnings of his introduction to his experiments. He was a schoolmaster of eighteen, at a " primary " establishment attached to the College at Carpentras. He taught the babies to read, the children to write, and the elder boys fractions and Euclid. The schoolroom was dark and damp ; and the great joy in the curriculum was to get out into the fields for lessons in open-air geometry, which meant practical surveying. The College supplied a five-franc graphometer; the rest of the surveyor's equipment, chain and stakes, arrows, level, square, and compass, came out of the assistant-master's salary, that being as much as seven hundred francs a year. The teacher bought the equipment, and the boys were proud to carry the stakes through the town. But when they came to the field of operations their enthusiasm suffered a change. The plain, the " bermes," as it is called in the district, " stretched far and wide, covered with nothing but flowering thyme and rounded pebbles. There was ample scope for every imaginable polygon; trapezes and triangles could be

• The Meson Bees. By J. Henri Fabre. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattes. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [6s. not.)

combined in all sorts of ways." But these wore not the only possibilities perceived by the pupils. The teacher's attention was attracted by something suspicious. A boy sent to plant a stake would stop on his way and stoop, neglecting his line and signals. Another would forget his arrows and take up a pebble ; another, deaf to measurements, would crumble a clod of earth between his fingers. Most of the boys were caught licking straws. The surveying ceased; what was the mystery ?

The master inquired, and found that a big black bee made clay nests on the pebbles of the hernias. The nests contained

honey; the boys got the honey through a straw; their teacher joined them, putting off the polygon till later. That was the beginning of Fabre's work with the mason bees ; it was his introduction to the insect to test whose powers and instincts he made so many patient experiments. What is the secret of the power possessed by bees of returning to their nests from a distance P Fabre conducted series after series of trials with marked bees which he carried two or three miles from their homes, afterwards watching for their return. The pro- cess of marking—that is, placing on the thorax a dot of powdered chalk mixed with gum—was not easy, and his comments are characteristic :—

" You do not come off scot-free when handling one after the other forty wrathful Bees, who promptly unsheath and brandish their poisoned stings. The stab is but too often given before the mark is made. My smarting fingers make movements of self- defence which my will is not always able to control. I take hold with greater precaution for myself than for the insect; I some- times squeeze harder than I ought to if I am to spare my travellers. To experiment so as to lift, if possible, a tiny corner of the veil of truth is a fine and noble thing, a mighty stimulant in the face of danger ; but still one may be excused for displaying some impatience when it is a matter of receiving forty stings in one's fingers at one short sitting."

Fa.bre's experiments did not lift the veil for him ; all that he could determine was the percentage of bees which found their way home again. He tried every way of puzzling

them, going by different routes to his chosen point of flight, taking them through woods in which he could hardly find his own way, swinging the box containing them through

curves and circles in order to mark any confusion in their sense of direction. He happened once to describe these gyrations near a crucifix, and as a few days before he had been eeen removing bones from a prehistoric burial-place the countryfolk set down his antics as witchcraft. But his bees never gave up their secret. Not all came back ; some fell by the way, some, perhaps, were damaged in marking ; but

always a certain percentage found their way home, without adding more to his knowledge than the fact that they had done so.

The experiment of swinging the bees in circles before setting out was suggested to Fabre by Darwin, who had pre- viously thought of testing in this way the sense of direction

possessed by homing pigeons. Fabre, in his turn, was able to tell Darwin that French peasants believed that cats could

be prevented from returning to their old home in the same way; and that when it was desired to change a cat's home, all that was necessary was to twirl it round in a bag before starting. But neither of bees nor of cats did the country recipe prove true. Fabre bad made preliminary observations on the homing instincts of cats when he was compelled to give up one of his homes. In one case he left a cast behind which wanted to come with him ; in the other he took with him a cat which desired to stay at Lome; and both the cats found their way where they wished to be, through a maze of town streets and over a river, which they crossed by swimming. He himself never swung a cat, but he was able to discover plenty of proof that a swung cat could find its way home if it pleased. A weak kitten, a very young cat, might be lost ; but a cat in full possession of its senses never. Intelligent people whom he could trust informed him that they had tried the experi- ment, and that " none of them succeeded when the animal was full groWn. Though carried to a great distance into another house, and subjected to a conscientious series of revolutions, the Cat always came back" There was a cat which ate gold- fish in a Serignan fountain; it was taken from town to town, up into the mountain, out into the woods, swung religiously in bags ; it returned always, and met an inevitable end.

Great as was Fabre's respect for Darwin, there are no hypo< theses round which his humour plays more brilliantly than certain Darwinian theories, such as that of " mimesis," or protective mimicry. Here are the postulates. The lark becomes earth-coloured in order to hide himself from birds of prey which might swoop on him in the fields ; the common lizard takes on grass-green so as to blend with the leaves of the thickets ; the cabbage caterpillar, on guard against beaks and bills, assumes the colour of the plant on which it feeds ; and so on. And here is the reply:-

" By way of a parallel with the three examples which I have quoted, I ask myself why the White Wagtail, who seeks his food in the furrows as does the Lark, has a white shirt-front surmounted by a magnificent black stock. This dress is one of those most easily picked out at a distance against the rusty colour of the soil. Whence this neglect to practise mimesis, 'protective mimicry 'P He has every need of it, poor fellow, quite as much as his com- panion in the field.... Why is the Eyed Lizard of Provence as green as the Common Lizard, considering that he shuns verdure and chooses as his haunt, in the bright sunlight, some chink in tho naked rocks where not so much as a tuft of moss grows ? 'Why has the Spurge-caterpillar adopted for its dress the gaudiest colours and those which contrast most with the green of the leaves which it frequents P Why does it flaunt its red, black, and white in patches clashing violently with one another? Would it not be worth its while to follow the example of the Cabbage- caterpillar and imitate the verdure of the plant that feeds it? Has it no enemies ? Of coarse it has; which of us, animals and men, has not?"

These comparisons of creatures mimicking their surround- ings would have interested him, he tells us, in his callow youth. "I was just ripe for that kind of science." But when he became older and looked round him he doubted. His later advice to a beginner would be that to take mimesis as a guide means going wrong a thousand times for being right once. " With mimesis above all, it is wise, when the law says that a thing is black, first to inquire whether it does not happen to be white." But he will not, he ends by proclaim-

ing, set out his further doubts. A volume could be filled with doubts; a better volume with facts as a single observer can see and chronicle them, whatever they may mean, wherever they may lead inquiry. Even so, as man through age after age asks his questions of whys and wherefores, the answer which seems to be true to-day is known to be false to-morrow; the greatest of observers asks, chronicles, inquires; the goddess Isis continues veiled.