THE ORIGIN OF INSTINCTS 161 



letter written to Fabre, in which Darwin ' refers to the 

 great skill of the Gauchos in killing cattle, and suggests 

 that each young Gaucho sees how the others do it, and 

 with a very little practice learns the art V 



Lord Avebury identifies himself with this view, which, 

 indeed, he had himself set forth in the Contemporary 

 Review, in 1885. Concerning the instinct of the Ammo- 

 pJiila to sting the ganglionic centres of its caterpillar prey, 

 he suggests that ' during these long ages they may have 

 gradually learnt the spots where their sting would be 

 most effective, and ... so have gradually acquired their 

 present habits'. 2 He finally concludes that ' these remark- 

 able instincts ' are ' the result of innumerable repetitions 

 of similar actions carried on by a long series of ancestors '. 3 



George J. Romanes, in reviewing Lord Avebury's book, 

 goes much further : — ' Here, by the way, we have an 

 excellent instance of the difficulty which we so often 

 encounter in the domain of instinct, when we relinquish 

 the so-called Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of 

 acquired characters. The hypothesis in question goes 

 upon the supposition that some of the ancestors of the 

 Sphex were intelligent enough to notice the peculiar 

 effects which followed upon stinging insects or caterpillars 

 in the particular regions occupied by nerve-centres, and 

 that, in consequence of being habitually guided by their 

 intelligence to sting in these particular regions, their 

 action became hereditary, i.e. instinctive. But if, in 

 accordance with post-Darwinian theory, we relinquish 

 this possible guidance by intelligence, and suppose that 

 the whole of this wonderful instinct was built up by 

 natural selection waiting for congenital (i.e. fortuitous) 

 variations in the direction of a propensity to sting, say, 

 the nine nerve-centres of a caterpillar — then it surely 

 becomes inconceivable that such an instinct should ever 

 have been developed at all.' 4 



1 Sir J. Lubbock, On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Atiimals, 

 with Special Reference to Insects. London, 1888. Internal. Sci. Ser., 

 p. 248. 



2 lb. p. 248. a lb. p. 252. 

 4 Nature, vol. xxxix, 1888, p. 77. 



POILTON M 



