48 histhict, 



maxim accepted almost without a dissenting voice, 

 that animals provide for themselves by Instinct. 

 Instinct seems to be regarded as something that 

 has power to lay the world under contribution for 

 its possessor's good. It has been considered quite 

 too much by itself, rather than as a part only of 

 that complicated series of adjustments by which liv- 

 ing beings are kept upon the globe. How small a 

 part it plays among the lower animals, and the rank 

 of its work, will be best understood by understand- 

 ing the whole machinery of which it is only one 

 wheel — a part essential to the range of animal life 

 upon the globe, but still utterly valueless were there 

 not a more complicated machinery or more com- 

 plicated parts of the same machine in constant op- 

 eration. Instinct alone would be like the loom of 

 the cotton-mill with no card or spinning-frame to 

 prepare material for its work. It is in the inorgan- 

 ic world, in the vegetable kingdom and in the anat- 

 omy and physiology of the animal system that we 

 find the supplementary parts of that nicely-adjusted 

 machine which we call Nature. 



The earth is clothed with plants, the rivers, lakes 

 and oceans have their share of vegetable life. And 

 rising higher still on the land and swarming in the 

 waters, are the varied forms of the animal kingdom. 

 We speak of animals as adapting themselves to the 

 world by Instinct, and of the plants as finding their 

 places by some law of distribution. All this is true. 

 But the immediate agencies that attract our atten- 

 tion in both cases are only a part, and a small part, 



