218 LIFE AND HABIT. 



parcel into each hole where an egg is deposited. When 

 the wasp worm is hatched, it finds a store of provision 

 ready made; and what is most curious, the quantity- 

 allotted to each is exactly sufficient to support it, till 

 it attains the period of wasphood, and can provide for 

 itself. This instinct of the parent wasp is the more 

 remarkable as it does not feed upon flesh itself. Here 

 the little creature has never seen its parent ; for by the 

 time it is born, the parent is always eaten by sparrows ; 

 and yet, without the slightest education, or previous 

 experience, it does everything that the parent did before 

 it. Now the objectors to the doctrine of instinct may 

 say what they please, but young tailors have no intui- 

 tive method of making pantaloons ; a new-born mercer 

 cannot measure diaper ; nature teaches a cook's 

 daughter nothing about sippets. All these things 

 require with us seven years' apprenticeship ; but in- 

 sects are like Moliere's persons of quality — they know 

 everything (as Moliere says), without having learnt 

 anything. ■ Les gens de qualite* savent tout, sans avoir 

 rien appris.' " 



How completely all difficulty vanishes from the 

 \ facts so pleasantly told in this passage when we bear in 

 -mind the true nature of personal identity, the ordinary 

 forking of memory, and the vanishing tendency of con- 

 sciousness concerning what we know exceedingly well. 



My last instance I take from M. Eibot, who writes : — 

 " Gratiolet, in his Anatomie Comparde du Systtme Nerveux, 

 states that an old piece of wolf's skin, with the hair 

 all worn away, when 1 set before a little dog, threw the 

 animal into convulsions of fear by the slight scent 



