20 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



panions, which all drop down into the place pointed out, combine their 

 efforts, drag out the ball, and set it on its path again. What did the 

 scarabee say to its comrades ? how did it make itself understood ? 

 how did it bring them back with it ? It is not possible to make any- 

 positive answer to these questions ; what is beyond dispute is, that 

 there was in this case a concert of intelligences knowing how to under- 

 stand each other and to come together. Nothing more is needed for 

 the assertion that the insect judges, wills, and perhaps speaks, a lan- 

 guage of which we know as yet neither the signs nor the organs. 



Cuvier, then, was in error when he announced that instinct in ani- 

 mals is in an inverse ratio to their intelligence. The contrary seems 

 rather to be true, and it is at least probable that in those intelligences 

 of insects which feel, will, understand, deliberate, there are, on a finer 

 scale, differences similar to those we remark in the higher animals. 

 The faculty is common to all, but with shades as marked among the 

 wild beasts of menageries as among our domestic animals. One is 

 cross, and another jealous ; this one is good-tempered, that other quar- 

 relsome, faithful to the house, or a vagabond in the streets all are 

 more or less intelligent. In the lower animals these differences have 

 not been as closely observed ; in the first place, they are probably less 

 distinctly marked, and in any case they are much more difficult to ob- 

 serve for reasons of all kinds. The small size of the being, its life 

 wholly alien to our own, the predominance of instinct, are all so many 

 impediments; but, on the other hand, the acts we see them perform 

 under our very eyes, the admitted existence of faculties that may.be 

 compared with our own, and those of a relatively high order, allow 

 of very little doubt that not only do insects possess a remarkably-de- 

 veloped intelligence, but that this intelligence presents, in consequence 

 of its very development, individual variations, just as in the higher 

 animals. 



This is already a great advance upon Descartes, whose strange 

 theory no one at this day, that we are aware of, undertakes to defend ; 

 but this is not all a new step has been taken in these later times. We 

 are beginning, with our better knowledge, to ask whether those intellec- 

 tual and instinctive faculties, arranged by Cuvier in two parallel series, 

 may not have some common bond, so that one would flow from the other, 

 and instinct, after all, be definitely a product of intelligence. The ques- 

 tion has its importance. Instinct would then no longer be one of 

 those essential properties of living beings which absolutely elude our 

 comprehension, such as thought in the brain, contraction in the mus- 

 cles, the electricity of the eel, or the gleam of the glow-worm ; it 

 would be accessible, like all dependent phenomena, to our processes of 

 experiment and investigation. 



Darwin is entitled to the credit of having taken the question into 

 this entirely new region. This bold attempt to found the scientific 

 study of instinct is found rather indefinitely in the " Origin of Spe- 



