Doubtless to bees, as to men, revenge is sweeter than
honey. But, in the face of mental science, can
a creature as low down in the scale of organization
as a leaf-cutting bee be credited with anything so
intelligent and emotional as deliberate anger and revenge,
“which implies the need of retaliation to satisfy
the feelings of the person (or bee) offended?”
According to Bain (Mental and Moral Science)
only the highest animals—stags and bulls
he mentions-can be credited with the developed form
of anger, which, he describes as an excitement caused
by pain, reaching the centres of activity, and containing
an impulse knowingly to inflict suffering on another
sentient being. Here, if man only is meant, the
spark is perhaps accounted for, but not the barrel
of gunpowder. The explosive material is, however,
found in the breast of nearly every living creature.
The bull—ranking high according to Bain,
though I myself should place him nearly on a level
mentally with the majority of the lower animals, both
vertebrate and insect—is capable of a wrath
exceeding that of Achilles; and yet the fact that a
red rag can manifestly have no associations, personal
or political, for the bull, shows how uniutcllectual
his anger must be. Another instance of misdirected
anger in nature, not quite so familiar .as that of
the bull and red rag, is used as an illustration by
one of the prophets: “My heritage is unto
me as a speckled bird; the birds round, about are
against it.” I have frequently seen the
birds of a thicket gather round some singularly marked
accidental visitor, and finally drive him with great
anger from the neighbourhood. Possibly association
comes in a little here, since any bird, even a small
one, strikingly coloured or marked, might be looked
on as a bird of prey.
The flesh-fly laying its eggs on the carrion-flower
is only a striking instance of the mistakes all instincts
are liable to, never more markedly than in the inherited
tendency to fits of frenzied excitement: the
feeling is frequently excited by the wrong object,
and explodes at inopportune moments.
CHAPTER XIII.
NATURE’S NIGHT LIGHTS.
(Remarks about Fireflies and other matters.)
It was formerly supposed that the light of the firefly
(in any family possessing the luminous power) was
a safeguard against the attacks of other insects,
rapacious and nocturnal in their habits. This
was Kirby and Spence’s notion, but it might
just as well be Pliny’s for all the attention
it would receive from modern entomologists: just
at present any observer who lived in the pre-Darwin
days is regarded as one of the ancients. The
reasons given for the notion or theory in the celebrated
Introduction to Entomology were not conclusive;
nevertheless it was not an improbable supposition
of the authors’; while the theory which has
taken its place in recent zoological writings seems
in every way even less satisfactory.
Copyrights
The Naturalist in La Plata from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
