INSTINCT. 139 



cable. Take, not the most remarkable, but the best authenticated example 

 of this class — the frequently alleged fact of dogs and other animals 

 returning in a straight line, or by the most direct routes, through dis- 

 tricts they had never before traversed, to places from which they had 

 been taken by devious tracks, and even shut up in close boxes. To most 

 people this is a phenomenon sufficiently incomprehensible. They are 

 certain they themselves could do nothing at all like it. But there is in 

 some men what may be just a hint of this faculty. Most people that 

 have lived only in cities are very soon lost in a strange and trackless 

 district, and still sooner in a pathless wood; in the one case, after 

 wandering this way and that for a few hours, in the other, after merely 

 turning round a few times, they can tell nothing of the direction whence 

 they came. But all men are not so easily lost ; some, without consciously 

 making notes, retain, after long wandering in such situations, a strong 

 and often accurate impression, not of the ground they have gone over, 

 but of the direction in which lies the place whence they started. With- 

 out attempting to throw any light on the mental chemistry of this per- 

 ception, we would submit that in it may perhaps be found a clue to the 

 mystery of those astonishing home-journeys of dogs, sheep, cats, pigeons, 

 bees, etc., of which hundreds are on record. 



It is, however, with the other dark enigma that we are more specially 

 concerned. We do not think it necessary to examine the proof of the 

 actuality of such marvelous instincts as those of bees and wasps. But 

 for the too fond love of a theory we venture to think none would doubt 

 the reality, or the instinctive character, of their "far-sighted," or, 

 more correctly, blind provisions for the future. The problem before 

 us is not whether, for example, the male of the fish Arius does, and by 

 instinct, hatch the eggs of the female in his mouth, but how such a 

 singular mode of incubation ever had a beginning? Perhaps the most 

 widely known instance of this class of instincts is the provision of the 

 solitary wasp for the worm that will issue from her egg after her own 

 death. She brings grubs — food that as a wasp she never tasted — and 

 deposits them over the egg, ready for the larva she will never see. The 

 life history of every insect exhibits instincts of this perplexing descrip- 

 tion. Witness the caterpillar, how at the proper time it selects a suitable 

 situation and spins for itself a silken cocoon. It may be admitted at 

 once that the creatures, as we behold them, never could have lived to 

 acquire such instincts by any process of experience and inheritance of 

 which we can conceive. Nor let it be supposed that it is only in the 

 insect world, where all is so strange, that instincts are to be met with 

 so essential to lives of the individuals or their progeny that without 

 them the creatures in their present shape could never have existed. Of 

 this kind are the first movements observable in the life of a bird, and 

 which take place within the shell. I have often observed the self-delivery 



