436 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



Romanes's secondary instincts depend upon the inheritance 

 of habits intelligently acquired. By the school of Professor 

 Weismann, therefore (if we may so call it without injustice 

 to Mr. Francis Galton), secondary instincts, in so far as 

 any individual acquisition is concerned, are denied. 

 Opposed to this school are those who lay great stress on 

 the inheritance of acquired characters. Some of them 

 seem driven to the opposite extreme in the matter of 

 instinct, and appear to hold that instincts are entirely (or 

 let us say almost entirely) due to lapsed intelligence. 

 Professor Eimer, of Tubingen, for example, says,* " I 

 describe as automatic actions those which, originally per- 

 formed consciously and voluntarily, in consequence of 

 frequent practice, come to be performed unconsciously and 

 involuntarily. . . . Such acquired automatic actions can 

 be inherited. Instinct is inherited faculty, especially is 

 inherited habit." In his discussion of the subject, Pro- 

 fessor Eimer seems to make no express allusion to primary 

 instincts. And he regards at any rate some of those 

 which are classed by Mr. Romanes as primary, as due to 

 lapsed intelligence. " Every bird," he says f " must, from 

 the first time it hatches its eggs, draw the conclusion that 

 young will also be produced from the eggs which it lays 

 afterwards, and this experience must have been inherited 

 as instinct." He says J that the infant takes the breast 

 and sucks " in accordance with its acquired and inherited 

 faculties." He believes that " the original progenitors of 

 our cuckoo, when they began to lay their eggs in other 

 nests, acted by reflection and with design." Regarding the 

 mason-wasps and their allies, which sting larvae in the 

 ganglia which govern muscular action, and thus provide 

 their young with paralyzed but living prey, he exclaims,! 

 " What a wonderful contrivance ! What calculation on 

 the part of the animal must have been necessary to discover 

 it ! " Of the storing instincts of bees he remarks,H " Selec- 

 tion cannot here have had much influence, since the 



* " Organic Evolution," pp. 223, 224. t Ibid. p. 263. 



\ Ibid. p. 303. Ibid. p. 258. || Ibid. p. 279. \ Ibid. p. 276. 



