obtain an experimental proof which seems to me decisive. I would add
that the Pompilus has very short sight: often she passes within a
couple of inches of her Spider without seeing her.


CHAPTER 7. SOME REFLECTIONS UPON INSECT PSYCHOLOGY.

The laudator temperis acti is out of favour just now: the world is on
the move. Yes, but sometimes it moves backwards. When I was a boy, our
twopenny textbooks told us that man was a reasoning animal; nowadays,
there are learned volumes to prove to us that human reason is but a
higher rung in the ladder whose foot reaches down to the bottommost
depths of animal life. There is the greater and the lesser; there are
all the intermediary rounds; but nowhere does it break off and start
afresh. It begins with zero in the glair of a cell and ascends until
we come to the mighty brain of a Newton. The noble faculty of which we
were so proud is a zoological attribute. All have a larger or smaller
share of it, from the live atom to the anthropoid ape, that hideous
caricature of man.

It always struck me that those who held this levelling theory made
facts say more than they really meant; it struck me that, in order to
obtain their plain, they were lowering the mountain-peak, man, and
elevating the valley, the animal. Now this levelling of theirs needed
proofs, to my mind; and, as I found none in their books, or at any
rate only doubtful and highly debatable ones, I did my own observing,
in order to arrive at a definite conviction; I sought; I experimented.

To speak with any certainty, it behoves us not to go beyond what we
really know. I am beginning to have a passable acquaintance with