pecial act of reason in order to bring
about certain results. These results, which were, at first, the outcome
of special acts of ratiocination, or accidental happenings leading to the
good of the creature or creatures in which they occurred, finally became
habitual and instinctive.

These special acts of ratiocination are of daily, of hourly, occurrence
in the lives of countless myriads of the lower animals, and escape our
observation because of the obtuseness of our senses. Every now and then,
however, the observer is able to chronicle such an act of reason, and
thus adduce the proposition that if the creature or creatures were
continually placed in surroundings requiring a like act of reason, that
act would eventually become habitual and instinctive on the part of that
creature or those creatures. I have witnessed hundreds of acts of
intelligent ratiocination in the lower animals that were not called
forth by experience and which had not a single faculty of heredity. For
instance, several years ago I noticed that one of the combs in a
beehive, owing to the extreme heat, had become melted at the top and was
in great danger of falling to the floor. The bees had noticed this
impending calamity long before I had, and had already set about averting
it. They rapidly threw out a buttress or supporting pillar from the comb
next to the one in danger, and joined it firmly to it, thus shoring it
up and preventing its fall in a most effectual manner. When they had
made everything strong and secure, they went to the top of the comb and
reattached it to the ceiling of the hive. After this had been done to
their satisfaction, they removed the shoring pillar and used the wax
elsewhere. In this instance, there was an immediate adaptation of
themselves to surrounding circumstances, in which they averted and
prevented an utterly unforeseen and unheard-of catastrophe by means as
effectual as they were intelligent. Could man do more or reason better?
Here was an experience which had not happened to them in hundreds and
hundreds of generations, perhaps; which, perhaps, had never happened to
them before, and yet, when it did happen, their quick intelligence
readily grasped the situation, and they at once set about remedying the
evil.[77]

[77] Compare Huber, Vol. II. p. 280; see also Chap. IV. of this work.

A mud-dauber wasp built a nest in my room, and used an open ventilating
window as an entrance and exit. On one occasion this wind