Social Insects. 49 



that mind is divisible into feeling and understanding. Most of 

 the acts of these social insects are, it is true, what we call in 

 stinctive*; but as I have so often had occasion to express my 

 views and the reasons for them, on the subject of instinct, it is 

 unnecessary to enlarge upon them further than to state that the 

 instinctive acts of insects are often combined, in a greater or less 

 degree, with a low order of conscious reasoning, and that while 

 this is generally of the intuitive kind, it is, on occasions, delib 

 erate and reflecting. 



"If in the insect Reason's twilight ray 



Sheds on the darkling mind a doubtful day, 



Plain is the steady light her Instincts yield, 



To point the road o'er life's unvaried field ; 



If few those instincts, to the destined goal, 



With surer course, their straiten'd currents roll." Evans. 



Two beliefs that have very generally prevailed among men up 



*Romanes considers that the instincts of neuter insects are themselves 

 sufficient to refute Lewes' theory of instinct as being lapsed intelligence 

 transmitted through heredity ; and he criticises Spencer's views that " the 

 automatic actions of a bee building one of its wax cells answer to outer re 

 lations so constantly experienced that they are, as it were, organically re 

 membered." He bases his criticism upon th<> statement that the bee "begins 

 by performing these actions before it has itself had any individual experi 

 ence of cell-making and without its parents ever having had any ancestral 

 experience." While this statement represents accepted belief, it follows 

 from what I have already said of the bee that it is essentially untrue. The 

 worker could no more begin to secrete wax and build cells until it had ac 

 quired a certain age than could mammals secret the lacteal fluid before a 

 certain age ; and during its early life as an adult it had the experience of its 

 older fellows to guide it, were such guidance necessary. The example 

 chosen by Romanes was simply unfortunate. To understand the development 

 of the cell-building instinct, we must consider the stages of its development 

 as illustrated in the varying forms of cells yet existing, from the cruder cells 

 of Bombus on, and remember that each step in the more perfect building 

 has been accompanied by structural modifications, and that the instincts 

 have been accumulated and perfected by heredity pari pawn with the struc 

 tures ; further that the habit probably became so firmly fixed before the 

 neuters had been differentiated, that it has been transmitted since that 

 time through the queen, though she herself no longer possesses it; 

 further that while instinctive performance is ordinarily inevitable, it 

 yet varies in the amount of its fixity and accuracy and often leads astray or 

 fails; and, finally, that it is often modified by individual experience or 

 reason, or by communal interest or necessity these truths applying particu 

 larly to the social insects, and in a variable degree to all animals. 



