Mind and heredity / by Vernon L. Kellogg.

  • Vernon Lyman Kellogg
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Mind and heredity / by Vernon L. Kellogg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    43/136 (page 21)
    REFLEXES OF HONEY-BEES 21 herited instinct? Or can it, too, be seen as a positive and inevitable result of a mechani¬ cal reaction to a certain specific and imme¬ diate physico-chemical stimulus? If the ab¬ domen, or even just that posterior part of it containing the eggs, is cut off from a female moth, thus leaving the head, with brain, eyes and sense-organs on the antennse, and the thorax with its large mid-body ganglion, quite separated from the egg-laying organs (ovaries, ovi-ducts, muscles) with the small posterior abdominal ganglion and its nerves which run from the skin and to the muscles of the hinder part of the abdomen, this cut¬ off hinder fraction of the body, if its ventral side is brought in contact with the bottom of the tray in which the moths are kept, or if this fragment of the body be turned over and its ventral side is rubbed, will extrude the eggs. The performance of egg-laying will be carried on just as it would be by an un- mutilated female. In other words, the inter¬ esting and useful egg-laying behavior of the adult female moth—which is practically all of its behavior in its whole adult life—is, the mechanists would say, simply an inevit¬ able physical or mechanical reaction by a small mass of living substance to a group of physico-chemical stimuli.