act of boring. Around the nest a new barrier appears, the wall made by
the paper bag; but, in order to pierce this, the insect would have to
repeat the act which it has just accomplished, the act which it is not
intended to perform more than once in its life; it would, in short,
have to make into a double act that which by nature is a single one;
and the insect cannot do this, for the sole reason that it has not the
wish to. The Mason-bee perishes for lack of the smallest gleam of
intelligence. And this is the singular intellect in which it is the
fashion nowadays to see a germ of human reason! The fashion will pass
and the facts remain, bringing us back to the good old notions of the
soul and its immortal destinies.

Reaumur tells us how his friend Duhamel, having seized a Mason-bee
with a forceps when she had half entered the cell, head foremost, to
fill it with pollen-paste, carried her to a closet at some distance
from the spot where he captured her. The Bee got away from him in this
closet and flew out through the window. Duhamel made straight for the
nest. The Mason arrived almost as soon as he did and renewed her work.
She only seemed a little wilder, says the narrator, in conclusion.

Why were you not here with me, revered master, on the banks of the
Aygues, which is a vast expanse of pebbles for three-fourths of the
year and a mighty torrent when it rains? I should have shown you
something infinitely better than the fugitive escaping from the
forceps. You would have witnessed--and in so doing, would have shared
my surprise--not the brief flight of the Mason who, carried to the
nearest room, releases herself and forthwith returns to her nest in
that familiar neighbourhood, but long journeys through unknown
country. You would have seen the Bee whom I carried to a great
distance from her home, to quite unfamiliar ground, find her way back