INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS. 227 



spring of the varying creature. It may be answered 

 that we cannot know anything about this, but that 

 "like father like son" is an ultimate fact in nature. 

 I can only answer that I never observe any "like 

 father like son" without the son's both having had 

 every opportunity of remembering, and showing every 

 symptom of having remembered, in which case I decline 

 to go further than memory (whatever memory may be) 

 as the cause of the phenomenon. 



But besides inheritance, teaching must be admitted 

 as a means of at any rate modifying an instinct. We 

 observe this in our own case ; and we know that animals 

 have great powers of communicating their ideas to one 

 another, though their manner of doing this is as incom- 

 prehensible by us as a plant's knowledge of chemistry, 

 or the manner in which an amceba makes its test, or 

 a spider its web, without having gone through a long 

 course of mathematics. I think most readers will allow 

 that our early training and the theological systems of 

 the last eighteen hundred years are likely to have made 

 us involuntarily under-estimate the powers of animals 

 low in the scale of life, both as regards intelligence 

 and the power of communicating their ideas to one 

 another ; but even now we admit that ants have great 

 powers in this respect. 



A habit, however, which is taught to the young ol 

 each successive generation, by older members of the 

 community who have themselves received it by instruc- 

 tion, should surely rank as an inherited habit, and be 

 considered as due to memory, though personal teaching 

 be necessary to complete the inheritance. 



