226 LIFE AND HABIT. 



are acquainted — namely, those of the hive-bee and of 

 many ants, could not possibly have been acquired by habit!* 

 ("Origin of Species," p. 206, ed. 1876.) The italics in 

 this passage are mine. 



No difficulty is opposed to my view (as I call it, for 

 the sake of brevity) by such an instinct as that of ants 

 to milk aphids. Such instincts may be supposed to 

 have been acquired in much the same way as the in- 

 stinct of a farmer to keep a cow. Accidental discovery 

 of the fact that the excretion was good, with " a little 

 dose of judgement or reason " from time to time appear- 

 ing in an exceptionally clever ant, and by him com- 

 municated to his fellows, till the habit was so confirmed 

 as to be capable of transmission in full unself-con- 

 sciousness (if indeed the instinct be unself-conscious in 

 this case), would, I think, explain this as readily as the 

 slow and gradual accumulations of instincts which had 

 never passed through the intelligent and self-conscious 

 stage, but had always prompted action without any idea 

 of a why or a wherefore on the part of the creature itself. 



For it must be remembered, as I am afraid I have 

 already perhaps too often said, that even when we have 

 got a slight variation of instinct, due to some cause 

 which we know nothing about, but which I will not 

 even for a moment call "spontaneous" — a word that 

 should be cut out of every dictionary, or in some way 

 branded as perhaps the most misleading in the lan- 

 guage — we cannot see how it comes to be repeated in 

 successive generations, so as to be capable of being 

 acted upon by "natural selection" and accumulated, un- 

 less it be also capable of being remembered by the off- 



