EDUCATION IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 529 



"While among the mammals this business of training is usually 

 intentional and a family matter, attended to by the mother, with 

 such invertebrates as bees and ants, in which the females are simply 

 egg-laying machines, the mother's educational function is null, and 

 the care of the young rests with the sterile workers. Yet the mental 

 side of the maternal function subsists in mother ants in a latent state, 

 and virgin females have been seen, according to Huber, busying 

 themselves with the eggs and the larvae. But as a rule the training 

 in the nest is a grand social affair, committed to the female workers, 

 who devote themselves with complete abnegation to their task, and 

 seem to enjoy themselves in performing it. When the young have 

 gone through their metamorphoses, their nurses, now become in- 

 structors, keep with them, guiding them through the labyrinth of 

 the city in all its windings; and this education is probably carried 

 much further than observers are able to follow it, for the working 

 ants must be trained for their duties. Their industry is too compli- 

 cated to be purely mechanical and blindly instinctive as is often sup- 

 posed. But the observation of this training requires distinctions 

 between individual ants which the human eye is hardly competent to 

 make. Among the slaveholding ants the education consists largely 

 in transforming certain inveterate tendencies. They make war upon 

 another species, the brown ants, capture their young, and bring them 

 up to be their own slaves, in ignorance of the species to which they 

 belong, and of its traits. An equivalent to this transforming tend- 

 ency of education may be found among the vertebrates, where, if we 

 take the young early enough, we can disturb their hereditary func- 

 tional manifestations to a considerable extent. Young chickens, 

 raised apart, do not learn to drink by filling their beak and raising 

 their head, but plunge their bill into the full vessel. Newborn 

 babes soon lose the faculty of sucking if they are fed with the 

 spoon. 



All this is because, notwithstanding morphological differences, 

 all living beings have something in common at the bottom; so that 

 the physiological psychology of one species may illustrate that of 

 others, and even of man. In short, we have good grounds for saying 

 that all animals, whether vertebrates or not, but possessing nervous 

 centers, however little developed, are susceptible of education; with 

 all a suitable training long enough continued can to a certain extent 

 derange the hereditary tendencies which we call instinctive, and 

 even create new ones. These perturbations, these metamorphoses of 

 native tendencies, are observable with special ease in domestic ani- 

 mals. "We have a right to be surprised that, after having so success- 

 fully adapted the few animals with which we are acquainted to his 

 service and use, man has not tamed many others. We may suppose 



TOL. LII. 39 



