PuRNELL. — On True Instincts of Animals. 29 



Cats and dogs instruct and correct their young; so do 

 monkeys. Tigers and wolves teach their young how to hunt 

 and kill their prey ; and, speaking generally, the adult Car- 

 nivora train their offspring for the battle of life. 



Some of the most remarkable so-called instincts displayed 

 by animals can be accounted for in the same way, and when 

 we come to analyse these instincts we find that they are 

 nothing more nor less than tribal habits, passed on from gene- 

 ration to generation, and acquired in a similar way to that 

 in which the racial habits of mankind are acquired. Let 

 us take for example a singular instinct of the huanaco, or 

 guanaco, a small camel-like animal found in South America. 

 In the southern part of Patagonia there are dying-places of 

 the huanaco, to which all individuals inhabiting the surround- 

 ing plains repair at the approach of death in order to yield up 

 the ghost there. "The best known of these dying- or burial- 

 places," says Hudson in " The Naturalist in La Plata," " are 

 on the banks of the Santa Cruz and Gallegos Kivers, where 

 the river-valleys are covered with dense primeval thickets 

 of bushes and trees of stunted growth. There the ground is 

 covered with the bones of countless dead generations." " The 

 animals," says Darwin, "in most cases must have crawled 

 befoi-e dying beneath and among the bushes." This peculiar 

 habit of the huanaco seems to be of a local nature, restricted to 

 South Patagonia. In Northern Patagonia, and on the Chilian 

 and Peruvian Andes, where the huanaco is also found, no such 

 instinct has been observed. Mr. Hudson endeavours to ac- 

 count for the origin of this habit by assuming that, in far 

 distant ages, the huanaco "had formed a habit of congre- 

 catiug with its fellows at certain seasons at the same spot ; 

 further, that there were seasons of suffering to the animal — 

 the suffering, or discomfort, or danger, having in the first 

 place given rise to the habit. Assuming, again, that the 

 habit had existed so long as to become a fixed immutable 

 instinct, a hereditary knowledge, so that the young huanaco, 

 untaught by the adults, would go alone and unerringly to the 

 meeting-place from any distance, it is but an easy step to the 

 belief that, after the conditions had changed, and the refuges 

 were no longer needed, this instinctive knowledge would still 

 exist in them, and that they would take the old road when 

 stimulated by the pain of a wound, or the miserable sensa- 

 tions experienced in disease, or during the decay of the life- 

 energy, when the senses grow dim, and the breath fails, and 

 the blood is thin and cold." Mr. Hudson's theory is a not 

 improbable explanation of the origin of the habit; but it seems 

 to be an unwarranted assumption on his part that the young 

 huanaco, about to die, proceeds to one of these dying-places 

 without being taught by the adults to do so. The huanaco is 



