ANIMAL BEHAVIOR. 323 



Biologists and psychologists alike have very generally clung 

 tenaciously to the idea that instincts, in part at least, have been 

 derived from habits and intelligence; and the main effort has 

 been to discover how an instinct- could become gradually 

 stamped into organization by long-continued uniform reactions 

 to environmental influences. The central question has been : 

 How can intelligence and natural selection, or natural selection 

 alone, initiate action and convert it successively into habit, 

 automatism, and congenital instinct ? In other words, the 

 genealogical history of the structural basis being completely 

 ignored, how can the instinct be mechanically rubbed into the 

 ready-made organism ? Involution instead of evolution ; mech- 

 anization instead of organization ; improvisation rather than 

 organic growth ; specific versus phyletic origin. 



This inversion, or rather perversion, of the genealogical 

 order leads to a very short-focussed vision. The pouting 

 instinct is supposed to have arisen de novo, as an anomalous 

 behavior, and with it a new race of pigeons. The tumbling 

 instinct was a sort of lusus natures, with which came the fan- 

 cier's opportunity for another race. The pointing instinct was 

 another accident that had no meaning except as an individual 

 idiosyncrasy. The incubation instinct was supposed to have 

 arisen after the birds had arrived and laid their eggs, which 

 would have been left to rot had not some birds just blundered 

 into " cuddling " over them and thus rescued the line from 

 sudden extinction. How long this blunder-miracle had to be 

 repeated before it happened all the time does not matter. 

 Purely imaginary things can happen on demand. 



b. The Incubation Instinct. 



i . Meaning to be Sought in Phyletic Roots. It seems 

 quite natural to think of incubation merely as a means of 

 providing the heat needed for the development of the egg, 

 and to assume that the need was felt before the means was 

 found to meet it. Birds and eggs are thus presupposed, and 

 as the birds could not have foreseen the need, they could not 

 have hit upon the means except by accident. Then, what an 



