ty, settled exclusively
in the reeds; the others remained faithful to the Snail-shell or else
entrusted their eggs partly to the spirals and partly to the cylinders.
With the first, who were the pioneers of cylindrical architecture, there
was no hesitation that I could perceive: after exploring the stump of
reed for a time and recognizing it as serviceable, the insect
instals itself there and, an expert from the first touch, without
apprenticeship, without groping, without any tendencies bequeathed by
the long practice of its predecessors, builds its straight row of cells
on a very different plan from that demanded by the spiral cavity of the
shell which increases in size as it goes on.

The slow school of the ages, the gradual acquisitions of the past,
the legacies of heredity count for nothing therefore in the Osmia's
education. Without any novitiate on its own part or that of its
forebears, the insect is versed straight away in the calling which it
has to pursue; it possesses, inseparable from its nature, the qualities
demanded by its craft: some which are invariable and belong to the
domain of instinct; others, flexible, belonging to the province of
discernment. To divide a free lodging into chambers by means of mud
partitions; to fill those chambers with a heap of pollen-flour, with a
few sups of honey in the central part where the egg is to lie; in short,
to prepare board and lodging for the unknown, for a family which the
mothers have never seen in the past and will never see in the future:
this, in its essential features, is the function of the Osmia's
instinct. Here, everything is harmoniously, inflexibly, permanently
preordained; the insect has but to follow its blind impulse to attain
the goal. But the free lodging offered by chance varies exceedingly in
hygienic conditions, in shape and in capacity. Instinct, which does
not choose, which does not contrive, would, if it were alone, leave
the insect's existence in peril. To help her out of her predicament,
in these complex circumstances, the Osmia possesses her little stock of
discernment, which distinguishes between the dry and the wet, the solid
and the fragile, the sheltered and the exposed; which recognizes the
worth or the worthlessness of a site and knows how to sprinkle it with
cells according to the size and shape of the space at disposal. Here,
slight industrial variations are necessary and inevitable; and the
insect excels in them without any apprent