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Updated: May 11, 2025
Let us return for a moment to the problematical function of the antennæ. The male Oak Eggar has a sumptuous pair, as has the Great Peacock or Emperor Moth. Are we to regard these silky "feelers" as a kind of directing compass? I resumed, but without attaching much importance to the matter, my previous experiment of amputation. None of those operated on returned.
The truffle-dog is in the same case; he searches with his nose to the ground. The true truffle, however, the essential object of his search, possesses a fairly vivid odour. But what are we to say of the Great Peacock moth and the Oak Eggar, both of which find their captive female? They come from the confines of the horizon. What do they perceive at that distance?
I repeated the experiment with the Oak Eggar. This time I used all the resources of scent and stench that my knowledge of drugs would permit. A dozen saucers were arranged, some in the interior of the wire-gauze cover, the prison of the female, and some around it, in an unbroken circle.
During my prolonged searches every bush and thicket and heap of stones in my neighbourhood had become familiar to me, and I can assert that the Oak Eggar was not to be found there. For such a swarm to collect as I found in my laboratory the moths must have come from all directions, from the whole district, and within a radius that I dare not guess at.
For emission substitute undulation, and the problem of the Great Peacock moth is explained. Without any material emanation a luminous point shakes the ether with its vibrations and fills with light a sphere of indefinite magnitude. So, or in some such manner, must the warning effluvium of the mother Oak Eggar operate.
Why did their feathery "feelers" leave them in ignorance of events which would have brought flocks of the other Eggar? Once more, the organ does not determine the aptitude. One individual or species is gifted, but another is not, despite an organic equality. In the matter of physics we hear of nothing to-day but the Röntgen rays, which penetrate opaque bodies and photograph the invisible.
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