Habit and Instinct. 437 



workers do not reproduce. In order to make these favour- 

 able conditions constant, insight and reflection on the part 

 of the animals, and inheritance of these faculties, were 

 necessary." And he concludes,* " Thus, according to the 

 preceding considerations, automatic action may be described 

 as habitual voluntary action ; instinct, as inherited habitual 

 voluntary action, or the capacity for such action." 



Professor Eimer would not probably deny the co-opera- 

 tion of natural selection in the establishment of these 

 instincts, but he throws it altogether into the background. 

 Now, such a view seems to me wholly untenable. Many of 

 the instincts of insects are performed only once in the 

 course of each individual life. Can it be supposed that the 

 weaving of a cocoon by the caterpillar is mainly a matter 

 of lapsed intelligence ? Even if we credit the hen bird 

 with the amount of reflection supposed by Professor Eimer, 

 can we grant to the ancestors of the ichneumon fly such 

 far-reaching observation and intelligence as really to 

 foresee (not by blind prevision, but through intelligent 

 foresight) the future development of the eggs which she 

 lays in a caterpillar? Are we to suppose that the instinctive 

 action of the young cuckoo, which, the day after it is hatched, 

 will eject all the other occupants of a hedge-accentor's 

 nest,t can have had its origin in lapsed intelligence ? If, 

 because of their purposive character, we are to regard such 

 instincts as of intelligent origin, may we not be told that 

 through intelligent design the pike has beset its jaws, 

 palate, and gill-arches with innumerable teeth, all back- 

 wardly directed for the purpose of holding its slippery prey ; 

 and the eagle has protected its eye with a bony ring of 

 sclerotic plates, like the holder of an optician's watch-glass? 

 If mimicry in form and colour is due to natural selection, 

 why not mimicry in habits and activities ? If structures of 

 a wonderfully purposive character have been evolved with- 



* " Organic Evolution/' p. 298. The late G. H. Lewes held somewhat 

 similar views. 



t See Mr. John Hancock, Natural History Transactions, Northumberland, 

 Purham, and Newcastle-on-Tyne, vol. viii. (1886) ; and Nature^ vol. xxxiii 

 p. 519. 



