228 MENTAL FACULTIES sec. 



in the presence of a friend, I shot down a crow from the roof 

 of my house, while the pigeons and starlings on the same 

 roof, to the great astonishment of my friend, to whom I had 

 predicted it, remained perfectly quiet. They had learned by 

 frequent experience at what my gun was aimed, and knew 

 that it did not threaten them. 



I mention these instances in the conviction that Weis- 

 mann himself knows many such, and that he has argued from 

 but one peculiar case, which, in my opinion, is possibly not 

 quite correctly interpreted, and, at any rate, is not by itself con- 

 clusive. When Weismann ascribes the disappearance of the 

 instinct of fear to the cessation of natural selection, I must 

 insist that my examples are entirely opposed to such a view. 

 They rather confirm the well-known fact that timidity even 

 in wild animals can be dispelled in a comparatively short time 

 by the results of experience, and that even deep-seated, 

 inherited timidity — the instinct of fear, if it must be called 

 so — can vanish in consequence of experience. They show 

 further, that this instinct of fear, because it can be dispelled 

 by experience, must be founded upon inherited, acquired 

 experience. 



At the conclusion of his discussion of the instinct of fear 

 Weismann says : " Among guinea-pigs, as among the various 

 kinds of pheasants which are bred in the poultry-yard, the 

 youngest animals are the wildest. The instinct of flight is 

 therefore here still inherited almost without any diminution, 

 and each individual has to be tamed anew. The tameness of 

 the adult animal is here still an ' acquired ' tameness, i.e. a 

 character acquired during the individual life ; it has not yet 

 affected the germinal cells : or rather, it is not yet the result 

 of such modification of the germinal cells as must gradually 

 take place in consequence of general crossing, but it arises 

 in exactly the same w^ay as in a wild animal captured when 

 young, a fox, wolf, finch, or rat, all of which can be tamed to 



