192 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ment in the methoclJ^ Sir Willlatn HauiiltOQ describes it as "an agent 

 which performs, blindly and igaorantly, a work of intelligence and 

 knowledge." Paley succinctly says : "An instinct is a propensity prior 

 to experience and independent of instruction." 



As might be supposed of the class of thinkers who had most 

 * knowledge of the subject, the naturalists have no such clear-cut defi- 

 nitions to offer, and as investigation proceeds, and observation extends^ 

 they become less and less inclined to Subscribe to the theory of the 

 fixity, the unimpressibility and unprogressiveness of animal mentality. 

 Their explanations on the subject are accordingly tentative, often some- 

 what conflicting, and include more of what instinct is 7iot than an 

 attempt to assert what it really is. 



Many of them incline decidedly to the theory of Pythagoras and 

 Plato among the ancients, and to the ideas of many of the leading evo- 

 lutionists of the present day, who contend for. the identity of this 

 faculty with reason in man, maintaining that "all the actions of animals, 

 however complicated, are, like those of the human race, the result of 

 observation, invention and experience." Opposed to this theory is, of 

 course, the ephemeral nature of the individual existence of many 

 organisms, the accuracy, not absolute, but suflSciently exact to estab- 

 lish the rule, with which the seeming objects of their being are accom- 

 plished, and, more than this, the fact that the actions of many animals 

 the farthest removed in physical structure from man, with a mere 

 nerve knot for a brain, display, in certain lines, an intelligence to which 

 even the powers of the most cultivated reason are not equal. Evolu- 

 tionists do not consider these valid objections to the theory of the 

 essential identity of reason and instinct, and account for the posses- 

 sion and apparent immutability of the latter, by the fact of the great 

 antiquity of the origin of the species guided by it, who had, ages pre- 

 vious to the appearance of man, perfectly adjusted themselves to the 

 environment, and had acquired habits which were, under the circum- 

 stances, the most advantageous possible, and these, having been trans- 

 mitted through countless generations, have become practically perma- 

 nent, and the mental constitution correspondingly unimpressible, with, 

 however, a capacity for change, when external conditions made the 

 latter necessary. From whichever point of view we regard it, whether 

 as reason within narrow limits, or as an impulse entirely distinct in its 

 nature, it offers us a most fascinating field of investigation, and calls 

 into exercise our highest capacity for admiration and wonder. 



Unquestionably it is in certain groups of insects that instinct most 

 nearly approaches perfection, for in this class of animals culminates, 

 for the present, one of the three diverging lines of organic develop- 



