30 Heredity. 



Darwin has endeavoured to explain in the same manner the 

 slave-making instincts of certain ants. From P. Huber's famous 

 observations, we know that female ants carry off the larvae of 

 the black ants, which become their slaves. Incapable of 

 any other work save that of warfare, they are fed, carried about, 

 cared for, and even governed by the slave ants. In England, the 

 formica sanguined, too, has slaves j these they employ in the labours 

 of the ants' nest, but they also work themselves. This instinct 

 may, according to Darwin, be explained as follows. First, these 

 ants stole some eggs from a foreign nest for food ; some of the 

 eggs were hatched, and the stranger ants did some service to the 

 community as workers. Hence the instinct of going and cap- 

 turing eggs with a view to having slaves. Then the masters, 

 leaving a part of their toil to their slaves, like English ants, came 

 finally to renounce labour altogether, like the Swiss ants. 



The theory which refers instincts to hereditary habits has also 

 been maintained in France, but only by naturalists who, like 

 Darwin, have given special attention to physiological phenomena. 

 The only author who, so far as we are aware, has put it forward 

 under its psychological form is Mr. Herbert Spencer. He has 

 endeavoured to show, not how such instincts those of the cuckoo, 

 the ant, and the beaver, for instance have arisen, but to discover 

 and describe, in a general way, the process of evolution which has 

 deduced complex from simple instincts, by heredity and selection. 

 Attacking the question of primal origin, which had been avoided 

 by Darwin, Spencer has attempted to give the true and complete 

 genesis of instincts. All we can do is to indicate the chief points 

 of this difficult synthesis. 



In the first place, from the author's special point of view that 

 of the unity of composition of psychological phenomena instinct 

 represents one of the first stages in the ascending evolution of 

 mind. In the faculties of instinct, memory, reason, etc., as they 

 are generally accepted, Mr. H. Spencer sees only a convenient way 

 of grouping and naming phenomena, but no real difference. These 

 phenomena form a series, in which there are only insensible tran- 

 sitions from class to class. In this ascending series, instinct 

 occupies an intermediate place between reflex action and memory ; 

 instinct may be regarded as a sort of organized memory, and 

 memory as a ^ort of nascent instinct. 



