THE RATE OF ANIMAL DEVELOPMENT. 255 



" Physicus. I think I have observed that birds learn to fly and 

 acquire the use of their wings by continued efforts in the same manner 

 as a child does that of his limbs. 



" Ornither. I can not agree with you. Young birds can not fly 

 as soon as they are hatched, because they have no wing-feathers ; but, 

 as soon as these are developed, and even before they are perfectly 

 strong, they use their wings, fly, and quit the nest without any educa- 

 tion from their parents." * 



Very similar assertions are found in a laborious attempt made by 

 the late Professor Whewell f to set aside the palpable fact that man, 

 like every other animal, has an instinctive or we might perhaps bet- 

 ter say an hereditary knowledge of the functions of his voluntary 

 organs. 



Said the Professor : " The child learns to distinguish forms and 

 positions by a repeated and incessant use of his hands and eyes ; he 

 learns to walk, to run, and to leap by slow and laborious degrees ; he 

 distinguishes one man from another and one animal from another only 

 after repeated mistakes. Nor can we conceive this to be otherwise. 

 How should the child know at once what muscles he is to exert that 

 he may stand and not fall, till he has often tried ? How should he 

 learn to direct his attention to the differences of different faces and 

 persons till he is roused by some memory, or hope which implies mem- 

 ory ? It seems to me as if the sensations could not, without consider- 

 able practice, be rightly referred to ideas of space, force, resemblance, 

 and the like. Yet that which thus appears impossible is, in fact, done 

 by animals. The lamb, almost immediately after its birth, follows its 

 mother, accommodating the action of its muscles to the form of the 

 ground. The chick just emerged from the shell picks up a minute in- 

 sect, directing its beak with the greatest accuracy. Even the human 

 infant seeks the breast and exerts its muscles in sucking almost as soon 

 as it is born." 



So, after all, " that which thus appears impossible " is, in fact, done 

 not by " animals " only, but by man also ! The concession contained 

 in the last sentence is simply fatal to what has gone before. To be 

 consistent the learned Professor ought by all means to have asserted 

 that an infant learns to suck only " by slow and laborious degrees," and 

 after its sensations have been rightly referred to appropriate " ideas." 

 It would scarcely be a more unwarrantable assumption than those he 

 has indulged in abundantly in the course of his argument. 



In the same vein as Davy and Whewell, teleologists and natural 

 theologians, when enlarging upon the marvels of instinct, have seldom 

 failed to " trot out " the colt, the calf, or the lamb, to invite our con- 

 sideration to the chickens and the " young ducks," and to erect upon 

 the precocity of these creatures as compared with the tedious devel- 



* Collected " Works," vol. ix. " Salmonia," p. 105. 

 f "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," ii., p. 616. 



