Jnatinct an& its Xeseons 



Who taught the nations of the field and wood 

 To shun their poison and to choose their food ? 

 Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand, 

 Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand ? 

 Who made the Spider parallels design, 

 Sure as De Moivre, without rule or line ? 

 Who bid the Stork, Columbus-like, explore 

 Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before ? 

 Who calls the council, states the certain day, 

 Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way ? 



(Essay on Man, iii.) 



MR. POPE was, clearly, in no doubt as to the answer, 

 when he framed his question in such terms as these. 

 The Darwinian bard, supposing him to be evolved, will 

 ask, not who, but what has ordered Nature thus; and 

 will call on science to reply that the blind selection of 

 unconscious force has framed all laws we trace in 

 Nature's course. What does Nature herself say? On 

 which side does she give evidence ? 



If through any of her phenomena she bears witness 

 to a plan consciously designed for definite ends, her 

 voice would appear to be most clear and emphatic in the 

 phenomena of instinct. There we firid abundant traces 

 of a force acting with a purpose, which yet is not the 

 purpose of the immediate agents : we find creatures 

 obviously deficient in the very elements of that power, 

 by which we have to solve every problem of our life, yet 

 solving some determined problem, it may be of extra- 

 ordinary intricacy, with a facile precision, to us wholly 

 incomprehensible ; powerless to originate the least shred 



VI. 



