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. 



