Cuvierian System of Zoology, 319 



property of the species, that all the individuals perform them 

 in the same manner, without any improvement. 



Thus working bees have, since the beginning of the world, 

 constructed the most ingenious edifices, agreeable to princi- 

 ples of the highest geometry, and destined to lodge and nourish 

 a posterity which is not even their own. Solitary bees and 

 wasps form also very complicated nests for their eggs. From 

 the Qgg there springs out a worm, which has never seen its 

 mother, which does not know the structure of the prison in 

 which it is enclosed, but when once it is changed into a wasp or 

 bee, it constructs a similar nest, equally perfect, for its own 



" We cannot," says Cuvier, " form a clear idea of instinct, 

 but by admitting that the animals endowed with it have, in the 

 sensorium, continued innate sensations and images, which deter- 

 mine them to act, like sensations received through the external 

 organs of sense. Instinct is a kind of dream, or vision, that 

 perpetually haunts them, and prompts them to action, and in 

 every thing that respects their instinctive motions, we may re- 

 gard animals as a kind of somnambulists. Instinct has been 

 granted to animals as a supplement to intelligence, to concur, 

 together with their strength and fecundity, in the preservation 

 of each species, in their due proportions. There are no visible 

 marks of instinct in the animal conformation ; but intelligence, 

 as far as we can observe, is in a constant proportion to the 

 relative size of the brain, and particularly to that of its two 

 hemispheres." 



The following remarks of Dr. Hartley, on the intellectual 

 faculties of brutes, are extremely judicious, and so much to the 

 purpose of the present essay, that I shall subjoin them : — 

 " The whole nature of each brute which has been brought 

 up among others of the same species, is a compound of instinct, 

 its own observation and experience, and imitation of those of 

 its own species. Instinct seems to have exerted its whole in- 

 fluence when the creature is arrived at m.aturity, and has 

 brought up its young, so that nothing 7iew can be expected 

 from it (instinct) afterwards. But the intellectual acquisitions 

 of brutes, from observation and experience, continue ; whence 

 old brutes are far more cunning, and can act better [pro re nata) 

 as circumstances arise, than young ones. It ought also to be 

 remembered that brutes, from their want of words, and from 

 our ignorance of those symbols which they use in giving inti- 

 mations to each other or to man, cannot make manifest to us 

 the extent of the reason they possess." ( Observatio7is on Man, 

 vol. i. p. 414.) B. 



