On Animal Instinct: in its Relation to the Mind of Man. 339 



ends are relations which never can be the direct objects of sensation, 

 and therefore a perception of them is an intuition of something which 

 is out of sight. It is a kind of dim mental seeing of that which is 

 invisible. And even if it be separated entirely in the lower animals 

 from any thing comparable with our own self-consciousness, it does not 

 the less involve in them a true reflection of and correlation with the 

 order of Nature and its laws The spinning machinery which is pro- 

 vided in the body of a spider is not more accurately adjusted to the 

 viscid secretion which is provided for it, than the instinct of tlie spider 

 is adjusted both to the construction of its web and also to the selection 

 of likely places for the capture of its prey. Those birds and insects 

 whose young are hatched by the heat of fermentation have an intui- 

 tive impulse to select the proper materials, and to gather them for the 

 purpose. All creatures, guided sometimes apparently by senses of 

 which we know nothing, are under like impulses to provide effectually 

 for the nourishing of their young; and it is most curious and insruct- 

 ive to observe that the extent of provision which is involved in the 

 process, and in securiug of the result, seems very often to be greater 

 as we descend in the scale of nature, and in proportion as the parents 

 are dissociated from the actual feeding or personal care of their off- 

 spring. The mammalia have nothing to provide except food for them- 

 selves, and have at first, and for a long time, no duty to perform 

 beyond the discharge of a purely physical function. Birds have more 

 to do — in the building of nests, in the choice of sites for these, and 

 after incubation in the choice of food adapted to the period of growth. 

 Insects, much lower in the scale of organization, and subject to the 

 wonderful processes of metamorphosis, have to provide very often for 

 a distant future, and for successive stages of development not only in 

 the young but in the nidus which surrounds them. Bees, if we are to 

 believe the evidence of observers, have an intuitive guidance in the 

 selection of food which has the power of producing organic changes in 

 the bodies of the young, even to the determination and development of 

 sex, so that, by the administration of it under what may be called arti- 

 ficial conditions, certain selected individuals can be made the mothers 

 *nd queens of future hives. These are but a few examples of facts 

 of which the whole animal world is full, presenting, as it does, one vast 

 series of adjustments between bodily organs and corresponding instincts. 

 But this adjustment would be useless unless it were part of another 

 adjustment — between the instinct and the perceptions of animals and 

 those facts and forces of surrounding nature which are related to them, 

 and to the whole cycle of things of which they form a part. Li those 

 instinctive actions of the lower animals which involve the most distant 



