190 LIFE AND HABIT. 



air with its long hair-like proboscis uncurled, and in- 

 serted into the minute orifices of flowers ; and no one 

 I believe has ever seen this moth learning to perforin 

 its difficult task, which requires such unerring aim • 

 (" Expression of tbo Emotions," p. 30). 



And, indeed, when we consider that after a time the 

 most complex and difficult actions come to be per- 

 formed by man without the least effort or consciousness 

 — that offspring cannot be considered as anything but 

 a continuation of the parent life, whose past habits and 

 experiences it epitomises when they have been suffi- 

 ciently often repeated to produce a lasting impression 

 — that consciousness of memory vanishes on the mem- 

 ory's becoming intense, as completely as the conscious- 

 ness of complex and difficult movements vanishes as 

 soon as they have been sufficiently practised — and 

 finally, that the real presence of memory is testified 

 rather by performance of the repeated action on recur- 

 rence of like surroundings, than by consciousness of 

 recollecting on the part of the individual — so that 

 not only should there be no reasonable bar to our attri- 

 buting the whole range of the more complex instinctive 

 actions, from first to last, to memory pure and simple, 

 no matter how marvellous they may be, but rather 

 that there is so much to compel us to do so, that we 

 . find it difficult to conceive how any other view can 

 have been ever taken — when, I say, we consider all 

 these facts, we should rather feel surprise that the hawk 

 and sparrow still teach their offspring to fly, than that 

 the humming - bird sphinx moth should need no 

 teacher. 



