Nest-building, Incubation, and Migration. 251 



the transmissionist may exclaim, which bears the marks of 

 its intelligent, and therefore acquired origin, this of feign- 

 ing wounded is assuredly one of them ! What habit, the 

 natural selectionist may ask, is more obviously useful to 

 the species ? Is not this just the kind of activity which 

 natural selection, if it be a factor at all, must fix upon 

 and perpetuate through the elimination of short-comers ? 

 Those who adopted this habit would certainly thereby 

 enable their offspring to escape destruction by enemies ; 

 and these would survive to perpetuate the habit. 



Let us look at the natural selection view first, and 

 consider the relation which on this hypothesis the habit 

 in question bears to intelligence. For the selectionist 

 intelligence, in its practical application, is an absolutely 

 and distinctively individual factor. This is well brought 

 out in Prof. Weismann's essay on the musical faculty. 

 Briefly put, the case is this : natural selection may increase 

 in a series of generations the innate store of intelligent 

 faculty; but the application of that faculty remains a 

 matter of individual experience. It matters not whether, 

 as the result of such individual experience, the faculty is 

 applied in precisely the same way for a hundred genera- 

 tions ; it matters not that the individuals so applying then- 

 faculty are the sole survivors among a host of failures ; it 

 matters not how much elimination there is of those who 

 have less intelligence or of those who apply it differently ; 

 the application of the faculty in this particular way cannot 

 on selectionist principles be rendered hereditary and in- 

 stinctive. In the matter of human faculty Prof. Weismann 

 and his followers have not failed to insist on these facts, 

 if facts they be. They say that, no matter how assiduously 

 a man has from boyhood devoted his intellectual powers 

 to the study of mathematics, he can hand on to his son no 

 inherited increment of faculty. If the son, after all, does 



