This fact strikes me as rich in inferences. What! Here are sturdy
insects, to whom boring through granite is mere play, to whom a
stopper of soft wood and a paper partition are walls quite easy to
perforate despite the novelty of the material; and yet these vigorous
housebreakers allow themselves to perish stupidly in the prison of a
paper bag, which they could have torn open with one stroke of their
mandibles! They are capable of tearing it, but they do not dream of
doing so! There can be only one explanation of this suicidal inaction.
The insect is well-endowed with tools and instinctive faculties for
accomplishing the final act of its metamorphosis, namely, the act of
emerging from the cocoon and from the cell. Its mandibles provide it
with scissors, file, pick-axe and lever wherewith to cut, gnaw through
and demolish either its cocoon and its mortar enclosure or any other
not too obstinate barrier substituted for the natural covering of the
nest. Moreover--and this is an important proviso, except for which the
outfit would be useless--it has, I will not say the will to use those
tools, but a secret stimulus inviting it to employ them. When the hour
for the emergence arrives, this stimulus is aroused and the insect
sets to work to bore a passage. It little cares in this case whether
the material to be pierced be the natural mortar, sorghum-pith, or
paper: the lid that holds it imprisoned does not resist for long. Nor
even does it care if the obstacle be increased in thickness and a
paper wall be added outside the wall of clay: the two barriers, with
no interval between them, form but one to the Bee, who passes through
them because the act of getting out is still one act and one only.
With the paper cone, whose wall is a little way off, the conditions
are changed, though the total thickness of wall is really the same.
Once outside its earthen abode, the insect has done all that it was
destined to do in order to release itself; to move freely on the
mortar dome represents to it the end of the release, the end of the