DISCUSSIONS ON INSTINCT 297 
“instinct,” in the sense of inherited habit, is necessarily 
used. Baldwin, Mills, and Lloyd Morgan are practically 
agreed that the young chick seizes instinctively on 
being stimulated by some small, striking object at a 
suitable distance. This object may be nutritious, or it 
may be a feather, a pencil, or a nail-head, a drop of 
water, or a drop of ink. The mechanism is ready, and 
the stimulus, properly applied, produces the instinctive 
mechanical, or, as Lloyd Morgan would prefer, organic 
action. 
The object now held between the mandibles and 
mulled is subject to the examination, strikingly evident 
in the kingbird, of the tongue, an organ at the same 
time tactile, gustatory, and locomotory. It stands at 
the portal which leads from instinctive to reflex action, 
and is at once the inspector, reporter, and director of 
that which first stimulated the eye, and now, through a 
motor response, has been placed where it may stimulate 
other special sense organs—taste, touch, and probably 
smell. It is here that instinctive action becomes guided 
by individual control, and intelligence begins to act 
through experience. 
The mouth-parts of the young kingbird are large, 
and the deliberate movements are easily observed. I 
feel, therefore, that this second, and essential, portion 
of the process of eating and drinking in the small- 
mouthed chick may have been neglected or overlooked. 
Moreover, the process of the perfecting of the action of 
eating and drinking, through repetition and the guid- 
ance of the intelligence is, in the kingbird, com- 
paratively slow, and inclines one, on the grounds of 
Comparative Psychology, to the belief that the complex 
act of the chick may be only apparently perfect from 
the first, the successive processes of co-ordination being 
in the chick much more quickly perfected. 
