himself a compass?

And this is what the great scientist acknowledges: a special sense, so
foreign to our organism that we are not able to form a conception of
it, guides the Pigeon, the Swallow, the Cat, the Mason-bee and a host
of others when away from home. Whether this sense be magnetic or no I
will not take upon myself to decide; I am content to have helped, in
no small degree, to establish its existence. A new sense added to our
number: what an acquisition, what a source of progress! Why are we
deprived of it? It would have been a fine weapon and of great service
in the struggle for life. If, as is contended, the whole of the animal
kingdom, including man, is derived from a single mould, the original
cell, and becomes self-evolved in the course of time, favouring the
best-endowed and leaving the less well-endowed to perish, how comes it
that this wonderful sense is the portion of a humble few and that it
has left no trace in man, the culminating achievement of the
zoological progression? Our precursors were very ill-advised to let so
magnificent an inheritance go: it was better worth keeping than a
vertebra of the coccyx or a hair of the moustache.

Does not the fact that this sense has not been handed down to us point
to a flaw in the pedigree? I submit the little problem to the
evolutionists; and I should much like to know what their protoplasm
and their nucleus have to say to it.

Is this unknown sense localized in a particular part of the Wasp and
the Bee? Is it exercised by means of a special organ? We immediately
think of the antennae. The antennae are what we always fall back upon
when the insect's actions are not quite clear to us; we gladly put
down to them whatever is most necessary to our arguments. For that