Habit and Instinct. 453 



same purity. The instincts would be imperfect, and there 

 would be an inherited tendency to vary. And this, if con- 

 tinued, would tend to convert what had been a stereotyped 

 instinct into innate capacity ; that is, a general tendency 

 to certain activities (mental or bodily), the exact form and 

 direction of which is not fixed, until by training, from 

 imitation or through the guidance of individual intelligence, 

 it became habitual. Thus it may be that it has come 

 about that man, with his enormous store of innate capacity, 

 has so small a number of stereotyped instincts. 



But while intelligence, displayed under its higher form 

 of originality, may, in certain cases, lead to all-round 

 variation, tending to undermine instinct and render it less 

 stereotyped, intelligence, under its lower form of imitation, 

 has the opposite tendency. For young animals are more 

 likely to imitate the habits of their own species than the 

 foreign habits of other species, and such imitation would 

 therefore tend towards uniformity. 



Imitation is probably a by no means unimportant factor 

 in the development of habits and instincts. Mr. A. E. 

 Wallace, in his " Contributions to the Theory of Natural 

 Selection," contends that the nest-building habit in birds 

 is, to a large extent, kept constant by imitation. The 

 instinctive motive is there, but the stereotyped form is 

 maintained through imitation of the structure of the nest 

 in which the builders were themselves reared. Mr. Weir, 

 however, writing to Mr. Darwin, in 1868, says in a letter, 

 which Mr. Eomanes quotes,* " The more I reflect on Mr. 

 Wallace's theory, that birds learn to make their nests 

 because they have themselves been reared in one, the less 

 inclined do I feel to agree with him. ... It is usual with 

 canary-fanciers to take out the nest constructed by the 

 parent birds, and to place a felt nest in its place, and, 

 when the young are hatched and old enough to be handled, 

 to place a second clean nest, also of felt, in the box, remov- 

 ing the other. This is done to prevent acari. But I never 

 knew that canaries so reared failed to make a nest when 



* "Mental Evolution in Animals," p. 226. 



