108 INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOUR 
behaviour. Romanes distinguished instincts due to this mode 
of origin as “secondary ;” reserving the term “ primary” for 
those attributable to natural selection, and describing those in 
which both factors co-operate as “ instincts of blended origin.” 
The late Professor Eimer, of Tiibingen, going further than 
either Darwin or Romanes, reverted almost entirely to what we 
may term the Lamarckian interpretation. “I describe as 
automatic actions,” he says,* ‘those which, originally per- 
formed consciously and voluntarily, in consequence of frequent 
practice come to be performed unconsciously and involun- 
tarily. . . . Such acquired automatic actions can be inherited. 
Instinct is inherited faculty, especially is inherited habit.” In 
his discussion of the subject Eimer makes no express allusion 
to primary instincts ; but he attributes to lapsed intelligence 
some of those which were classed by Romanes as primary, and 
his tendency is to refer all instincts to the same source. 
“ very bird,” he says, “ must, from the first time it hatches its 
eggs, draw the conclusion that young will also be produced 
from the eggs which it lays afterwards, and this experience 
must have been inherited as instinct.” Why, in the first 
instance, it must draw the conclusion from observation if it 
inherit instinctive knowledge, is not made clear. But our 
present purpose is to indicate, not to criticize, Himer’s position. 
He claims that “the original progenitors of the cuckoo, when 
they began to lay their eggs in other nests, acted by reflection 
and design.” Of the behaviour of mason wasps and their allies, 
which provide their young with paralyzed but living prey, he 
exclaims, ‘ What a wonderful contrivance! What calculation 
on the part of the animal must have been necessary to discover 
it!” Of the instincts of neuter bees he remarks, “‘ Selection 
cannot here have had much influence, since the workers do not 
reproduce. In order to make these favourable conditions 
constant, insight and reflection on the part of the animals, and 
the inheritance of these faculties were necessary.” And he 
concludes, “Thus, according to the preceding considerations, 
automatic action may be described as habitual voluntary 
* “Orvanic Evolution,” pp. 223, 263, 258, 279, 276, 298. 
