LIFE IN SECONDARY TIMES 255 



The older generations, moreover, had time to educate their 

 young, and these being perpetually in contact with their 

 parents, imitated their actions, and thus were initiated into 

 life, profiting from the acquired experience which in this way 

 became transmitted from generation to generation. 



Their activity was limited at first to a few simple actions, 

 partly in the nature of those constituting what botanists have 

 long called tactism, and therefore unconscious acts. As the 

 organism perfected itself, these acts were replaced by others, 

 more or less conscious ; but the repetition of the same acts, 

 stimulated by the same circumstances, caused them to become 

 automatic, like those associated with habit or performed uncon- 

 sciously in sleep, those which are simply the result of tactism, 

 and those which Claude Bernard has called reflex actions, 

 and which we ourselves perform without the intervention of 

 our will and unregistered by our consciousness. Thus we blink 

 our eyes when a ray of light suddenly strikes them, make a 

 defensive movement if our face is menaced by a blow, and 

 contract our muscles in walking and swimming. In these 

 conditions the minute brain of the Insects, constantly 

 stimulated by the same influences, and set working by the 

 performance of the same actions, gradually acquired an 

 appropriate organization which was transmitted by heredity, 

 so that the slightest external stimulus thereafter sufficed to 

 set going a whole series of actions marvellously linked together, 

 succeeding each other in a given order, even when the specific 

 purpose they were intended to serve had been suppressed. 

 This was the elaboration of what is called instinct. 1 



Certainly the theory put forward above supposes an initial 

 intelligence analogous to that to be observed at the present 

 day at work side by side with automatism in Birds, which 

 live with their young in conditions not unlike those which 

 prevailed in the Cretaceous Period when Insects lived with 

 their larvae ; and it may come as a surprise that such fragile 

 creatures should be credited with similar intelligence. Such 



1 I developed this theory of instincts in 1881 in a textbook called Anatomie 

 el physiologie animates, written for the Philosophical Course of the Lyc6es. 

 Almost at the same time, although somewhat later, the same theory was 

 elaborated in England by G. J. Romanes in his volume on Animal 

 Intelligence, for the French translation of which I wrote a preface (1883). 

 Then we were both brought to a standstill by the difficulty of explaining the 

 transmission of instincts from one generation of Insects to the other, since two 

 generations are not contemporaneous. 



