164 SPECIES NOT 



tical, inasmuch as habits are acquired and 

 hereditary. Instincts are hereditary, but not 

 acquired. "Mr. D. says a young pointer which 

 points at birds without being taught, displays 

 an hereditary acquired instinct. I say he shews 

 an hereditary acquired habit. And so with the 

 greyhounds, the bulldogs, the tumblers, which he 

 presses into his service. Hunting hares is not 

 an instinct, courage in a bulldog, and tumbling 

 in pigeons are not instincts, they are acquired 

 habits; so the fear of young pheasants for dogs 

 is an acquired habit, which would be lost under 

 domestication. But the building of its nest by 

 the bird, or its house by the beaver, are purely 

 instinctive, and not to be acquired. 



Mr. Darwin says that the act of the cuckoo 

 in laying its eggs in another bird's nest is 

 "instinct," (page 176,) which might have been 

 acquired from the "habit" of one of its progen- 

 itors, of laying now and then an egg in another 

 bird's nest; that the young so reared would 

 inherit the habit, and so we should have pro- 

 duced, by "natural selection" the "instinct" of 

 the European cuckoo! I merely remark that 

 habits and instincts, being totally different, are 

 not convertible. What is the operation of feeding 

 the cuckoo's young by the foster parent? Surely 

 instinctive? You could never convert it into a 

 habit. Why does a cuckoo which never saw a 

 nest, lay its egg in a nest? Surely from instinct. 

 Why in the nest of another bird? Mr. Darwin 

 says from an "instinct" acquired from a "habit," 



