INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS. 243 



man to mutilate cattle, or of ants to make slaves, or of 

 birds to make their nests. I can see no way of accounting 

 for the existence of any one of these instincts, except on 

 the supposition that they have arisen gradually, through 

 perceptions of power and need on the part of the animal 

 which exhibits them — these two perceptions advancing 

 hand in hand from generation to generation, and being 

 accumulated in time and in the common course of 

 nature. 



I have already sufficiently guarded against being sup- 

 posed to maintain that very long before an instinct or 

 structure was developed, the creature descried it in the 

 far future, and made towards it. We do not observe 

 this to be the manner of human progress. Our mechani- 

 cal inventions, which, as I ventured to say in "Erewhon," 

 through the mouth of the second professor, are really 

 nothing but extra-corporaneous limbs — a wooden leg 

 being nothing but a bad kind of flesh leg, and a flesh 

 leg being only a much better kind of wooden leg 

 than any creature could be expected to manufacture 

 introspectively and consciously — our mechanical in- 

 ventions have almost invariably grown up from small 

 beginnings, and without any very distant foresight on 

 the part of the inventors. When Watt perfected the 

 steam engine, he did not, it seems, foresee the locomo- 

 tive, much less would any one expect a savage to invent 

 a steam engine. A child breathes automatically, be- 

 cause it has learnt to breathe little by little, and has now 

 breathed for an incalculable length of time ; but it can- 

 not open oysters at all, nor even conceive the idea of 

 opening oysters for two or three years after it is born, 



