insects, after spending some forty years in their company. Let us
question the insect, then: not the first that comes along, but the
most gifted, the Hymenopteron. I am giving my opponents every
advantage. Where will they find a creature more richly endowed with
talent? It would seem as though, in creating it, nature had delighted
in bestowing the greatest amount of industry upon the smallest body of
matter. Can the bird, wonderful architect that it is, compare its work
with that masterpiece of higher geometry, the edifice of the Bee? The
Hymenopteron rivals man himself. We build towns, the Bee erects
cities; we have servants, the Ant has hers; we rear domestic animals,
she rears her sugar-yielding insects; we herd cattle, she herds her
milch-cows, the Aphides; we have abolished slavery, whereas she
continues her nigger-traffic.

Well, does this superior, this privileged being reason? Reader, do not
smile: this is a most serious matter, well worthy of our
consideration. To devote our attention to animals is to plunge at once
into the vexed question of who we are and whence we come. What, then,
passes in that little Hymenopteron brain? Has it faculties akin to
ours, has it the power of thought? What a problem, if we could only
solve it; what a chapter of psychology, if we could only write it!
But, at our very first questionings, the mysterious will rise up,
impenetrable: we may be convinced of that. We are incapable of knowing
ourselves; what will it be if we try to fathom the intellect of
others? Let us be content if we succeed in gleaning a few grains of
truth.

What is reason? Philosophy would give us learned definitions. Let us
be modest and keep to the simplest: we are only treating of animals.
Reason is the faculty that connects the effect with its cause and