268 MR. ROMANES' EXPERIMENTS. the boundary backwards and forwards in all directions. Two of them, however, we watched for an hour each. They meandered about, and at the end of the time one was about two feet from where she started, but scarcely any nearer home; the other about six feet away, and nearly as much further from home. I then took them up and replaced them near the nest, which they at once joyfully entered. I mentioned some of the foregoing facts in a paper which I read at the meeting of the British Association at Aberdeen, and they have since been confirmed by Mr. Romanes.* "In connection," he says, "with Sir John Lubbock's paper at the British Association, in which this subject is treated, it is perhaps worth while to describe some experiments which I made last year. The question to be answered is whether bees find their way home merely by their knowledge of landmarks, or by means of some mysterious faculty usually termed a sense of direction. The ordinary impression appears to have been that they do so in virtue of some such sense, and are therefore independent of any special knowledge of the district in which they may be suddenly liberated; and, as Sir John Lubbock observes, this impression was corroborated by the experiments of M. Fabre. The conclusions drawn from these experiments, however, appeared to me, as they appeared to Sir John, unwarranted by the facts; and therefore, like him, I repeated them with certain variations. In the result I satisfied myself that the bees depend entirely upon their special knowledge of district or landmarks, and it is because my experiments thus fully corroborate those * Nature, October 29, 1886. MR. ROMANES' EXPERIMENTS. 269 which were made by Sir John that it now occurs to me to publish them. "The house where I conducted the observations is situated several hundred yards from the coast, with flower-gardens on each side, and lawns between the house and the sea. Therefore bees starting from the house would find their honey on either side of it, while the lawns in front would be rarely or never visited— being themselves barren of honey, and leading only to the sea. Such being the geographical conditions, I placed a hive of bees in one of the front rooms on the basement of the house. When the bees became thoroughly well acquainted with their new quarters by flying in and out of the open window for a fortnight, I began the experiments. The modus operandi consisted in closing the window after dark when all the bees were in their hive, and also slipping a glass shutter in front of the hive door, so that all the bees were doubly imprisoned. Next morning I slightly raised the glass shutter, thus enabling any desired number of bees to escape. When the desired number had escaped, the glass shutter was again closed, and all the liberated bees were caught as they buzzed about the inside of the shut window. These bees were then counted into a box, the window of the room opened, and a card well smeared over with birdlime placed upon the threshold of the beehive, or just in front of the closed glass shutter. The object of all these arrangements was to obviate the necessity of marking the bees, and so to enable me not merely to experiment with ease upon any number of individuals that I might desire, but also to feel confident that no one individual could return to the hive unnoticed. For whenever a bee returned it was certain 270 MR. ROMANES' EXPERIMENTS. to become entangled in the bird-lime, and whenever I found a bee so entangled, I was certain that it was one which I had taken from the hive, as there were no other hives in the neighbourhood. "Such being the method, I began by taking a score of bees in the box out to sea, where there could be no landmarks to guide the insects home. Had any of these insects returned, I should next have taken another score out to sea (after an interval of several days, so as to be sure that the first lot had become permanently lost), and then, before liberating them, have rotated the box in a sling for a considerable time, in order to see whether this would have confused their sense of direction. But, as none of the bees returned after the first experiment, it was clearly needless to proceed to the second. Accordingly, I liberated the next lot of bees on the seashore, and, as none of these returned, I liberated another lot on the lawn between the shore and the house. I was somewhat surprised to find that neither did any of these return, although the distance from the lawn to the hive was not above two hundred yards. Lastly, I liberated bees in different parts of the flower-garden, and these I always found stuck upon the bird-lime within a few minutes of their liberation. Indeed, they often arrived before I had had time to run from the place where I had liberated them to the hive. Now, as the garden was a large one, many of these bees had to fly a greater distance, in order to reach the hive, than was the case with their lost sisters upon the lawn, and therefore I could have no doubt that their uniform success in finding their way home so immediately was due to their special knowledge of the flower-garden, and not to any general sense of direction. NO EVIDENCE OF SEPARATE SENSE OF DIRECTION. 271 "I may add that, while in Germany a few weeks ago, I tried on several species of ant the same experiments as Sir John Lubbock describes in his paper as having been tried by him upon English species, and here also I obtained identical results; in all cases the ants were hopelessly lost if liberated more than a moderate distance from their nest. M. Romanes' experiments, therefore, as he himself says, entirely confirm the opinion I have ventured to express-that there is no sufficient evidence among insects of anything which can justly be called a "sense of direction,' ( 272 ) CHAPTER XIV. ON THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE DOG. CONSIDERING the long ages during which man and the other animals have shared this beautiful world, it is surely remarkable how little we know about them. We have recently had various interesting works on the intelligence and senses of animals, and yet I think the principal impression which they leave on the mind is that we know very little indeed on the subject. THE DOG. As to the intelligence of the dog, a great many people, indeed, seem to me to entertain two entirely opposite and contradictory opinions. I often hear it said that the dog, for instance, is very wise and clever. But when I ask whether a dog can realize that two and two make four, which is a very simple arithmetical calculation, I generally find much doubt expressed. That the dog is a loyal, true, and affectionate friend must be gratefully admitted, but when we come to consider the psychical nature of the animal, the limits of our knowledge are almost immediately reached. I have elsewhere suggested that this arises in great measure from the fact that hitherto we have tried to teach animals, rather than to learn from them--to convey our ideas to |