394 ON INSECT AKATOITY. 



of action with every added cerebral function, has led to its being 

 accepted by many as the e7id as well as the leginning of our sentient 

 existence. And if consciousness, i.e. the perception of our own 

 sensations, acts, and thoughts, be also the outcome of organic action, 

 the mental calibre of man himself, no longer postulated by 

 metaphysicians, becomes a question of how many missing links 

 there may be between man and his congeners. 



But while the philosophers have "moved on," the old belief, that 

 insects possess the volitional powers now almost denied to man, 

 remains with those who have not followed modern movement, and 

 even our boasted civilisation is often unfavorably compared with the 

 insect's social instincts. Its extraordinarily diversified life-habits — 

 solitary or gregarious, predatory or timorous, parasitic or social > 

 upholding regularly constituted polities, monarchical or republican; 

 and, for all we know, as polemically inclined as man himself — seem 

 to imply the causal relation of insect action to will, and more than 

 simulate the subjection of motive to thought. One thing is 

 however certain, namely, that the modern doctrine of acquired and 

 newly-inherited faculties does not apply to the insect so as to make 

 it grow wiser by experience, except in its own generation. "Yet the 

 world is ready to affirm that an insect reasons because its acts appear 

 rational to man, whilst our advanced philosophers are occupied in 

 reducing seemingly rational acts of man to involuntary acts of his 

 body, of which he is unconscious. 



Kow, to this see-saw of opinion no end can be foreseen until the 

 disputants are all equally informed, and provided with the same 

 armoury of weapons; nor until the whole evidence of organic 

 mechanism is collected and sifted to its last detail. l^o one mean- 

 while will play a more useful part in the collection of this evidence 

 than he who succeeds in working out some unsettled problem of 

 homology of structure, or in clearing up some intricacy of nerve 

 physiology. Nor will the naturalist anywhere find examples of 

 organic structure more suited to render the solution of physiological 

 or mechanical problems clear to our perception than in the class 

 Insecta. 



