AUGUSTE FOREL
Auguste Forel, who in 1909 retired from the Chair of Morbid Psychology in the University of Zürich, was born on September 1, 1848, and is one of the greatest students of the minds and senses of the lower animals and mankind. Among his most famous works are his "Hygiene of Nerves and Mind," his great treatise on the whole problem of sex in human life, of which a cheap edition entitled "Sexual Ethics" is published, his work on hypnotism, and his numerous contributions to the psychology of insects. The chief studies of this remarkable and illustrious student and thinker for many decades past have been those of the senses and mental faculties of insects. He has recorded the fact that his study of the beehive led him to his present views as to the right constitution of the state—views which may be described as socialism with a difference. His work on insects has served the study of human psychology, and is in itself the most important contribution to insect psychology ever made by a single student. Only within the last two years has the work of Forel, long famous on the European Continent, begun to be known abroad.
I.—Insect Activity and Instinct
This subject is one of great interest, as much from the standpoint of biology as from that of comparative psychology. The very peculiar mechanism of instincts always has its starting-point in sensations. To comprehend this mechanism it is essential to understand thoroughly the organs of sense and their special functions.
It is further necessary to study the co-ordination which exists between the action of the different senses, and leads to their intimate connection with the functions of the nerve-centres, that is to say, with the specially instinctive intelligence of insects. The whole question is, therefore, a chapter of comparative psychology, a chapter in which it is necessary to take careful note of every factor, to place oneself, so to speak, on a level with the mind of an insect, and, above all, to avoid the anthropomorphic errors with which works upon the subject are filled.
At the same time the other extreme must equally be avoided—"anthropophobia," which at all costs desires to see in every living organism a "machine," forgetting that a "machine" which lives, that is to say, which grows, takes in nutriment, and strikes a balance between income and expenditure, which, in a word, continually reconstructs itself, is not a "machine," but something entirely different. In other words, it is necessary to steer clear of two dangers. We must avoid (1) identifying the mind of an insect with our own, but, above all, (2) imagining that we, with what knowledge we possess, can reconstruct the mind by our chemical and physical laws.
On the other hand, we have to recognise the fact that this mind, and the sensory functions which put it on its guard, are derived, just as with our human selves, from the primitive protoplasmic life. This life, so far as it is specialised in the nervous system by nerve irritability and its connections with the muscular system, is manifested under two aspects. These may be likened to two branches of one trunk.
(a) Automatic or instinctive activity. This, though perfected by repetition, is definitely inherited. It is uncontrollable and constant in effect, adapted to the circumstances of the special life of the race in question. It is this curious instinctive adaptation—which is so intelligent when it carries out its proper task, so stupid and incapable when diverted to some other purpose—that has deceived so many scientists and philosophers by its insidious analogy with humanly constructed machines.
But, automatic as it may appear, instinct is not invariable. In the first place, it presents a racial evolution which of itself alone already demonstrates a certain degree of plasticity from generation to generation. It presents, further, individual variations which are more distinct as it is less deeply fixed by heredity. Thus the divergent instincts of two varieties, e.g., of insects, present more individual variability and adaptability than do those instincts common to all species of a genus. In short, if we carefully study the behaviour of each individual of a species of insects with a developed brain (as has been done by P. Huber, Lubbock, Wasmann, and myself, among others, for bees, wasps, and ants), we are not long in finding noteworthy differences, especially when we put the instinct under abnormal conditions. We then force the nervous activity of these insects to present a second and plastic aspect, which to a large extent has been hidden from us under their enormously developed instinct.
(b) The plastic or adaptive activity is by no means, as has been so often suggested, a derivative of instinct. It is primitive. It is even the fundamental condition of the evolution of life. The living being is distinguished by its power of adaptation; even the amoeba is plastic. But in order that one individual may adapt itself to a host of conditions and possibilities, as is the case with the higher mammals and especially with man, the brain requires an enormous quantity of nerve elements. But this is not the case with the fixed and specialised adaptation of instinct.
In secondary automatism, or habit, which we observe in ourselves, it is easy to study how this activity, derived from plastic activity, and ever becoming more prompt, complex, and sure (technical habits), necessitates less and less expenditure of nerve effort. It is very difficult to understand how inherited instinct, hereditary automatism, could have originated from the plastic activities of our ancestors. It seems as if a very slow selection, among individuals best adapted in consequence of fortunate parentage, might perhaps account for it.
To sum up, every animal possesses two kinds of activity in varying degrees, sometimes one, sometimes the other predominating. In the lowest beings they are both rudimentary. In insects, special automatic activity reaches the summit of development and predominance; in man, on the contrary, with his great brain development, plastic activity is elevated to an extraordinary height, above all by language, and before all by written language, which substitutes graphic fixation for secondary automatism, and allows the accumulation outside the brain of the knowledge of past generations, thus serving his plastic activity, at once the adapter and combiner of what the past has bequeathed to it.
According to the families, genera, and species of insects, the development of different senses varies extremely. We meet with most striking contrasts, and contrasts which have not been sufficiently noticed. Certain insects, dragon-flies, for instance, live almost entirely by means of sight. Others are blind, or almost blind, and subsist exclusively by smell and taste (insects inhabiting caves, most working ants). Hearing is well developed in certain forms (crickets, locusts), but most insects appear not to hear, or to hear with difficulty. Despite their thick, chitinous skeleton, almost all insects have extremely sensitive touch, especially in the antennæ, but not confined thereto.
It is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the mental faculties of insects in order to judge with a fair degree of accuracy how they use their senses. We shall return to that point when summing up.
II.—The Vision of Insects
In vision we are dealing with a certain definite stimulus—light, with its two modifications, colour and motion. Insects have two sets of organs for vision, the faceted eye and the so-called simple eye, or ocellus. These have been historically derived from one and the same organ. In order to exercise the function of sight the facets need a greater pencil of light rays by night than by day. To obtain the same result we dilate the pupil. But nocturnal insects are dazzled by the light of day, and diurnal insects cannot see by night, for neither possess the faculty of accommodation. Insects are specially able to perceive motion, but there are only very few insects that can see distinctly.
For example, I watched one day a wasp chasing a fly on the wall of a veranda, as is the habit of this insect at the end of summer and in the autumn. She dashed violently in flight at the flies sitting on the wall, which mostly escaped. She continued her pursuit with remarkable pertinacity, and succeeded on several occasions in catching a fly, which she killed, mutilated, and bore away to her nest. Each time she quickly returned to continue the hunt.
In one spot of the wall was stuck a black nail, which was just the size of a fly, and I saw the wasp very frequently deceived by this nail, upon which she sprang, leaving it as soon as she perceived her error on touching it. Nevertheless, she made the same mistake with the nail shortly after. I have often made similar observations. We may certainly conclude that the wasp saw something of the size of a fly, but without distinguishing the details; therefore she saw it indistinctly. Evidently a wasp does not only perceive motion; she also distinguishes the size of objects. When I put dead flies on a table to be carried off by another wasp, she took them, one after another, as well as spiders and other insects of but little different size placed by their side. On the other hand, she took no notice of insects much larger or much smaller put among the flies.
Most entomologists have observed with what ingenuity and sureness dragon-flies distinguish, follow, and catch the smallest insects on the wing. Of all insects, they have the best sight. Their enormous convex eyes have the greatest number of facets. Their number has been estimated at 12,000, and even at 17,000. Their aerial chases resemble those of the swallows. By trying to catch them at the edge of a large pond, one can easily convince oneself that the dragon-flies amuse themselves by making sport of the hunter; they will always allow one to approach just near enough to miss catching them. It can be seen to what degree they are able to measure the distance and reach of their enemy.
It is an absolute fact that dragon-flies, unless it is cold or in the evening, always manage to fly at just that distance at which the student cannot touch them; and they see perfectly well whether one is armed with a net or has nothing but his hands; one might even say that they measure the length of the handle of the net, for the possession of a long handle is no advantage. They fly just out of reach of one's instrument, whatever trouble one may give oneself by hiding it from them and suddenly lunging as they fly off. Whoever watches butterflies and flies will soon see that these insects also can measure the distance of such objects as are not far from them. The males and females of bees and ants distinguish one another on the wing. It is rare for an individual to lose sight of the swarm or to miss what it pursues flying. It has been proved that the sense of smell has nothing to do with this matter. Thus insects, though without any power of accommodation for light or distance, are able to perceive objects at different distances.
It is known that many insects will blindly fly and dash against a lamp at night, until they burn themselves. It has often been wrongly thought that they are fascinated. We ought first to remember that natural lights, concentrated at one point like our artificial lights, are extremely rare in Nature. The light of day, which is the light of wild animals, is not concentrated at one point. Insects, when they are in darkness—underground, beneath bark or leaves—are accustomed to reach the open air, where the light is everywhere diffused, by directing themselves towards the luminous point. At night, when they fly towards a lamp, they are evidently deceived, and their small brains cannot comprehend the novelty of this light concentrated at one spot. Consequently, their fruitless efforts are again and again renewed against the flame, and the poor innocents end by burning themselves. Several domestic insects, which have become little by little adapted to artificial light in the course of generations, no longer allow themselves to be deceived thereby. This is the case with house-flies.
Bees distinguish all colours, and seldom confound any but blue and green; while wasps scarcely react to differences of colour, but note better the shape of an object, and note, for instance, where the place of honey is; so that a change of colour on the disc whereon the honey is placed hardly upsets them. Further, wasps have a better sense of smell than bees.
The chief discovery regarding the vision of insects made in the last thirty years is that of Lubbock, who proved that ants perceive the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum, which we are unable, or almost unable, to perceive.
It has lately been proved also that many insects appreciate light by the skin.
They do not see as clearly as we do; but when they possess well-developed compound eyes they appreciate size, and more or less distinctly the contours of objects.
Ants have a great faculty for recognition, which probably testifies to their vision and visual memory. Lubbock observed ants which actually recognised each other after more than a year of separation.
III.—Smell, Taste, Hearing, Pain
Smell is very important in insects. It is difficult for us to judge of, since man is of all the vertebrates except the whales, perhaps, the one in which this sense is most rudimentary. We can evidently, therefore, form only a feeble idea of the world of knowledge imparted by a smell to a dog, a mole, a hedgehog, or an insect. The instruments of smell are the antennæ. A poor ant without antennæ is as lost as a blind man who is also deaf and dumb. This appears from its complete social inactivity, its isolation, its incapacity to guide itself and to find its food. It can, therefore, be boldly supposed that the antennæ and their power of smell, as much on contact as at a distance, constitute the social sense of ants, the sense which allows them to recognise one another, to tend to their larvæ, and mutually help one another, and also the sense which awakens their greedy appetites, their violent hatred for every being foreign to the colony, the sense which principally guides them—a little helped by vision, especially in certain species—in the long and patient travels which they have to undertake, which makes them find their way back, find their plant-lice, and all their other means of subsistence.
As the philosopher Herbert Spencer has well pointed out, the visceral sensations of man, and those internal senses which, like smell, can only make an impression of one kind as regards space—two simultaneous odours can only be appreciated by us as a mixture—are precisely those by which we can gain little or no information relative to space. Our vision, on the contrary, which localises the rays from various distant points of space on various distinct points of our retina at the same time, is our most relational sense, that which gives us the most vast ideas of space.
But the antennæ of insects are an olfactory organ turned inside out, prominent in space, and, further, very mobile. This allows us to suppose that the sense of smell may be much more relational than ours, that the sensations thence derived give them ideas of space and of direction which may be qualitatively different from ours.
Taste exists in insects, and has been very widely written on, but somewhat inconclusively. The organs of taste probably are to be found in the jaws and at the base of the tongue. This sense can be observed in ants, bees, and wasps; and everyone has seen how caterpillars especially recognise by taste the plants which suit them.
Much has been written on the hearing of insects; but, in my judgment, only crickets and several other insects of that class appear to perceive sounds. Erroneous views have been due to confusing hearing with mechanical vibrations.
We must not forget that the specialisation of the organ of hearing has reached in man a delicacy of detail which is evidently not found again in lower vertebrates.
Pain is much less developed in insects than in warm-blooded vertebrates. Otherwise, one could not see either an ant, with its abdomen or antennæ cut off, gorge itself with honey; or a humble-bee, in which the antennæ and all the front of the head had been removed, go to find and pillage flowers; or a spider, the foot of which had been broken, feed immediately on this, its own foot, as I myself have seen; or, finally, a caterpillar, wounded at the "tail" end, devour itself, beginning behind, as I have observed more than once.
IV.—Insect Reason and Passions
Insects reason, and the most intelligent among them, the social hymenoptera, especially the wasps and ants, even reason much more than one is tempted to believe when one observes the regularly recurring mechanism of their instincts. To observe and understand these reasonings well, it is necessary to mislead their instinct. Further, one may remark little bursts of plastic judgment, of combinations—extremely limited, it is true—which, in forcing them an instant from the beaten track of their automatism, help them to overcome difficulties, and to decide between two dangers. From the point of view of instinct and intelligence, or rather of reason, there are not, therefore, absolute contrasts between the insect, the mammal, and the man.
Finally, insects have passions which are more or less bound up with their instincts. And these passions vary enormously, according to the species. I have noted the following passions or traits of character among ants: choler, hatred, devotion, activity, perseverance, and gluttony. I have added thereto the discouragement which is sometimes shown in a striking manner at the time of a defeat, and which can become real despair; the fear which is shown among ants when they are alone, while it disappears when they are numerous. I can add further the momentary temerity whereby certain ants, knowing the enemy to be weakened and discouraged, hurl themselves alone in the midst of the black masses of enemies larger than themselves, hustling them without taking the least further precaution.
When we study the manners of an insect, it is necessary for us to take account of its mental faculties as well as of its sense organs. Intelligent insects make better use of their senses, especially by combining them in various ways. It is possible to study such insects in their homes in a more varied and more complete manner, allowing greater accuracy of observations.