286 GENERALIZATIONS. 



If, as Darwin endeavours to demonstrate, instinct be the re- 

 sult of education, it would at the same time be capable of at- 

 taining perfection, and in the case of insects gifted with the 



forests, and journey for days together towards the sea to deposit their 

 eggs there or why birds migrate to the south in the autumn, often at a 

 time when they would still have abundance of food in Switzerland ; and 

 in like manner there are thousands of similar natural phenomena which 

 seem marvellous to us, because we do not know their connexion. Whether the 

 animals of geological times possessed the same instincts as the homologous 

 species now living, it is of course impossible to ascertain ; but it is very pro- 

 bable. On the other hand, it may certainly be shown that very likely the 

 instincts of the species still living have been as constantly persistent as their 

 external specific characters. The insects of England, no doubt, have the 

 same centre of origin as those of Switzerland j for they agree in species with 

 Swiss insects. The sea now prevents the passage of species from the Con- 

 tinent to England ; so that it is generally supposed that at the drift-period 

 there was a communication by land, and that this explains the agreement of 

 the fauna and flora of England with those of the opposite coast. The immi- 

 gration in question occurred in the earliest division of the drift-period ; for 

 the plants and animals of the coast of Norfolk agree with those of the Con- 

 tinent (p. 172). If we assume that England has been separated from the 

 Continent by the sea "for a hundred thousand years, this number would 

 according to Lyell and Darwin be regarded as rather too low than too high. 

 For so long, therefore, the animals of England have had a development in-' 

 dependent of those of the Continent ; but nevertheless they exhibit exactly the 

 same instincts as their continental fellows. The wasps and hornets, which con- 

 struct cells and combs as ingenious as those of bees, although of a different 

 material, make these in England precisely as in Switzerland ; and the same 

 remark applies to the humble-bees, bees, ants, and a thousand other insects. 

 Darwin thinks that he has ascertained with regard to Formica sanguinea (the 

 sanguinary ant) that in England it keeps fewer slaves than in Switzerland, and 

 therefore occupies itself more with work j but these are insignificant differ- 

 ences which vary with the seasons and with the individual colonies j for 

 Darwin himself relates that he observed a nest which had more slaves, and 

 that these worked even outside the nest. In general, the species in England 

 presents exactly the same phenomena as in Switzerland. The workers carry 

 away the slaves in their mandibles when they migrate ; they work with the 

 slaves in constructing the nest, and visit the aphides to get honey from them j 

 they milk these aphides in the same way by stroking them with the antennae 

 on the abdomen to induce the emission of the sweet fluid from the honey- 

 tubes j they make the slaves aid them in the feeding of the young, &c. &c. 

 All this they have done now for at least a hundred thousand years in the 

 same way ; for if the common ancestors of the English and Swiss ants had 

 not the same mode of life as their living descendants, it would be inconceiv- 



