298 Habit and Instinct. 



many minute characteristics, difficult to describe severally, 

 but none the less distinctive when taken together and 

 collectively, and serving to distinguish kind from kind. 

 One can hardly suppose that the special behaviour of 

 the pheasant, the characteristic demeanour of the duckling, 

 the high-stepping walk of the downy plover, the pretty 

 little ways of moorhen chicks, and the familiar traits of 

 domestic chickens, all of which are truly congenital in 

 their definiteness, have been of selection- value, and have 

 saved the ancestors of these several groups from elimina- 

 tion. Nor can it be said that they have any traceable 

 relation with other activities or characters of essential 

 utility to the species. Whence, then, comes their definite- 

 ness ? How have they arisen ? Are they evidences of that 

 transmission of acquired habits for which one school of 

 biologists are in search ? On this view it is difficult to see 

 how they have come to be so definite. One can under- 

 stand how habits which are intelligently adaptive may 

 pass by transmission into definite instincts, even if one 

 feels bound to demand adequate proof of such trans- 

 mission. But these traits do not bear the marks of such 

 intelligent adaptation. Just as the delicate shades of 

 distinction in behaviour and demeanour do not appear 

 to be of selection value, or to have reached definiteness 

 through the elimination of all those that failed to behave 

 in just this way, so too do they seem too trivial to be 

 worthy of intelligent choice from among the numberless 

 possibilities of individual demeanour and behaviour. It 

 would seem more reasonable to suppose that they are 

 incidental characters, wrought into the congenital nexus, 

 and thus though not directly, still indirectly, due to 

 natural selection. Even so, however, their definiteness 

 is somewhat difficult to explain. If one says that a duck- 

 ling behaves just in this particular way because it is a 



