INSTINCT IN INSECTS. 21 



cies." Darwin does not enter on the problem with deliberate purpose 

 as a physiologist. He continues to be what he is in the whole work, 

 the zoologist, exclusively occupied with his great theory : he foresees 

 and meets objections ; he has particularly anticipated those that might 

 be brought against him in the name of instinct ; and he gives, in a 

 few pages, a more complete study of instinct than any philosopher had 

 made before him, and the first study ever made by aid of experi- 

 ment. He ignores instinct as an essential property, and treats it as a 

 function that is, he explains it. Instinct, as he holds, is nothing but 

 a result from the intellectual faculties, properly so called, modified 

 in a particular way under the twofold power of habit and inherited 

 influence. 



Inherited tendency, like intelligence, is one of those properties pe- 

 culiar to living beings of which we can prove the existence, while its 

 principle completely and absolutely baffles investigation. When we 

 attempt to pierce the mystery by which the plant that springs from 

 the seed, the bird that grows from the yelk, will be more like the plant 

 or the bird it proceeds from than like any other, we confront the im- 

 penetrable unknown. Hereditary tendency does not merely carry 

 down from one generation to another all the imaginable modifications 

 of form, size, coloring; it extends to the cerebral faculties, transmitted 

 doubtless by the help of some physical peculiarity of the organ of in- 

 telligence. This is what is called the spirit of race, which decides that 

 one people shall be born brave and crafty, like the Greeks of Homer; 

 industrious, like the Chinese ; traders, like the Jews ; or hunters, like 

 the red-skin. This is, if we choose to term it so, a kind of instinct 

 that education sometimes allows us to control, but never eradicates. 

 As the wolf, fattened in the kennel, ends by going back to his wretched 

 life of the woods, the child of a savage reared in the midst of civiliza- 

 tion preserves in his mind, as upon his features, the deep, hereditary 

 stamp of his origin. Habit, almost as much as hereditary tendency, 

 is another mysterious faculty which we recognize without being able 

 to explain it. Some act, most difficult in appearance, which required 

 on the part of our brain a considerable effort of will and all our mental 

 activity, at last surprises us by almost performing itself. We might 

 say that attention and reflection have gone down into our limbs, which 

 perform the most delicate tasks, and protect themselves against attacks 

 from without, while the mind, occupied with something else, is pur- 

 suing a different object. Revue des Deux Mbndes. 



