hich their race encounters for the first time, ought to refuse
as unusual and suspicious any exotic leaves, especially when they have
at hand plenty of the leaves made familiar by hereditary custom. The
question was deserving of separate study.

Two subjects of my observations, the Hare-footed and the Silvery
Leaf-cutter, both of them inmates of my open-air laboratory, gave me a
definite answer. Knowing the points frequented by the two Megachiles,
I planted in their work-yard, overgrown with briar and lilac, two
outlandish plants which seemed to me to fulfil the required conditions
of suppleness of texture, namely, the ailantus, a native of Japan, and
the Virginian physostegia. Events justified the selection: both Bees
exploited the foreign flora with the same assiduity as the local
flora, passing from the lilac to the ailantus, from the briar to the
physostegia, leaving the one, going back to the other, without drawing
distinctions between the known and the unknown. Inveterate habit could
not have given greater certainty, greater ease to their scissors, though
this was their first experience of such a material.

The Silvery Leaf-cutter lent herself to an even more conclusive test. As
she readily makes her nest in the reeds of my apparatus, I was able,
up to a certain point, to create a landscape for her and select its
vegetation myself. I therefore moved the reed-hive to a part of the
enclosure stocked chiefly with rosemary, whose scanty foliage is not
adapted for the Bee's work, and near the apparatus I arranged an exotic
shrubbery in pots, including notably the smooth lopezia, from Mexico,
and the long-fruited capsicum, an Indian annual. Finding close at hand
the wherewithal to build her nest, the Leaf-cutter went no further
afield. The lopezia suited her especially, so much so that almost the
whole nest was composed of it. The rest had been gathered from the
capsicum.

Another recruit, whose co-operation I had in no way engineered, came
spontaneously to offer me her evidence. This was the Feeble Leaf-cutter
(Megachile imbecilla, GERST.). Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I saw
her, all through the month of July, cutting out her rounds and ellipses
at the expense of the petals of the Pelargonium zonale, the common
geranium. Her perseverance devastated--there is no other word for
it--my modest array of pots. Hardly was a blossom out, when the
ardent Megachiles came and scalloped it into crescents. The colour was
i