^ 



rip, 



62 INSTINCT AND REASON. 



casional exercises of true reason by be.asts or birds 

 always take place in exceptional conditions, and 

 often in circumstances which can seldom or never 

 liave occurred before in the liistory of their kind. 

 For example, no orang-outang in the wild state is 

 ever likely to come across a rope with three knots 

 in it, or to wish to open a locked door by trying 

 all the keys of a bunch, or to employ a crowbar 

 by way of a lever, in order to force a fastened 

 lock. All these are things that can have hap- 

 pened but seldom in the whole past history of 

 orang-outangdom. 



Indeed the most modern theory of the origin of 

 instinct refers it in almost every case to primarily 

 intelligent acts, so often performed by each race 

 that the mode of action has at last become in- 

 grained in the nervous system, and hereditarily 

 handed down, independently of experience. If 

 this theory be really true — and it is a theory 

 which obtains every day more and more of assent 

 from the scientific world — then instinct itself 

 must be regarded as a sort of organized and regis- 

 tered tribal reason, the inherited intelligence and 

 experience of an entire race, grown by practice into 

 an invariable habit, and indelibly fixed, as it were, 

 on the very brain and nerves of every individual 

 in the whole species. Birds, we may suppose, lirst 

 learned to build their nests by slow trials, much 

 as human beings have learned to build their houses; 



