istle, the usual purveyor.

In fact, I place a few stalks of clary and Babylonian centaury,
duly dried, near the reed-hives. The Diadem Anthidium is not long in
discovering the rich harvest. Straight away the wool is recognized as
being of excellent quality, so much so that, during the three or four
weeks of nest-building, I can daily witness the gleaning, now on the
clary, now on the centaury. Nevertheless the Babylonian plant appears to
be preferred, no doubt because of its whiter, finer and more plentiful
down. I keep a watchful eye on the scraping of the mandibles and the
work of the legs as they prepare the pellet; and I see nothing
that differs from the operations of the insect when gleaning on
the globe-thistle and the St. Barnaby's thistle. The plant from the
Euphrates and the plant from Palestine are treated like those of the
district.

Thus we find what the Leaf-cutters taught us proved, in another way,
by the cotton-gatherers. In the local flora, the insect has no precise
domain; it reaps its harvest readily now from one species, now from
another, provided that it find the materials for its manufactures. The
exotic plant is accepted quite as easily as that of indigenous growth.
Lastly, the change from one plant to another, from the common to the
rare, from the habitual to the exceptional, from the known to the
unknown, is made suddenly, without gradual initiations. There is no
novitiate, no training by habit in the choice of the materials for
the nest. The insect's industry, variable in its details by sudden,
individual and non-transmissible innovations, gives the lie to the two
great factors of evolution: time and heredity.

CHAPTER 10. THE RESIN-BEES.

At the time when Fabricius (Johann Christian Fabricius (1745-1808),
a noted Danish entomologist, author of "Systema entomologiae"
(1775).--Translator's Note.) gave the genus Anthidium its name, a name
still used in our classifications, entomologists troubled very little
about the live animal; they worked on corpses, a dissecting-room method
which does not yet seem to be drawing to an end. They would examine
with a conscientious eye the antenna, the mandible, the wing, the leg,
without asking themselves what use the insect had made of those organs
in the exercise of its calling. The animal was classified very nearly
after the manner adopted in crystallography. Structure was everything;
life, with its highest prerogatives, intellect, instinct, did not