THE UNSEEN GOAL 273 



Similarly, the digger-wasp that shows elaborate 

 parental care, securing the safety and success of 

 young which are never seen, does so because it 

 belongs to a race in which rearing the young and 

 perhaps enjoying their company was long ago the 

 rule. The internal voice that the creature obeys 

 is the reverberation of a distant past. 



When we try to picture the establishment of an 

 instinctive routine we naturally think of the creature 

 wrinkling its brows from step to step, and from 

 generation to generation deliberately introducing 

 little improvements, until the behavior becomes 

 at length, like a patent, extraordinarily perfect. 

 We naturally picture the process in this way, for 

 it is thus that we improve on our manipulations. 

 Now without denying that animals of the small- 

 brained instinctive type may better their behavior 

 by individual improvements, more or less intelli- 

 gent, we cannot believe that it was in this way that 

 instinctive behavior became established. Who, 

 indeed, shall dogmatize as to the impossibility of 

 individual experiences affecting the entailed in- 

 heritance of the race, or set limits to the " mysterious 

 wireless telegraphy of ante-natal life"; but it does 

 not seem likely that instinctive behavior is in 

 any direct way due to the transmission of the results 

 of the experiments made by the individual. Often, 

 for instance, a very effective piece of behavior 

 is performed only once in a lifetime, which does 

 not give much opportunity for heritable imprinting. 

 Often, again, the behavior is connected with the 



