464 DR. ST. GEORGE MIVART ON THE DEVELOPMENT [June 17, 



herself future tributes to her charms, she seeks to decorate her tiny 

 body with the arts of infant coquetry. Still less does she look 

 forward to the pains and pleasures of maternity, when she begins to 

 caress and chastise, to soothe and cherish her first doll, and fondly 

 presses it to that region whence her future offspring will draw its 

 nourishment. 



Again, when — the lapse of a few years having made her a young 

 woman and the boy a youth — they first feel the influence of 

 love, however ignorant they may be of the physiology of their race, 

 they will none the less, circumstances permitting, be surely impelled 

 towards the performance of very definite actions. In the more 

 refined individuals of the highest races of mankind, the material 

 element is most certainly far from being the one great end distinctly 

 looked forward to by each pair of lovers. Yet every incident of 

 affectionate intercourse infallibly leads on towards the one end, useful 

 to the race, which nature has in view. Such actions fully merit to 

 he called " instinctive." 



That animals even of the higher classes do perform actions which 

 are truly instinctive is generally admitted by naturalists. Mr. 

 "Wallace, indeed, believes that Birds learn to build their nests by 

 observing the structure of those in which they themselves are 

 reared. I have not found this view to be shared by other naturalists 

 of my acquaintance ; and, in spite of the deference and respect due to 

 so eminent an observer and so lucid a reasoner as my friend Mr. 

 Wallace, it seems to me a view which is untenable. Some of the 

 nests which require an especial skill in their construction are those 

 which are suspended and entirely enclosed save at one small aper- 

 ture. How the young within such a nest can, by observation, learn 

 to form it, is to me inconceivable. 



It is, however, the instincts of Insects which are the most won- 

 derful, and these are so numerous and so notorious that only one or 

 two instances at most need here be referred to, such as those of the 

 Carpenter Bee, the Wasp Sphex, and the larval Stag-Beetle, the 

 male of which, it is said, digs a hole, for its transformation, twice as 

 big as his own body (to allow for the development of his enormous 

 mandibles), while the female only digs one of her own size. 



Even more wonderful than the instincts of insects, are the actions 

 of those Rhizopods which, as Dr. Carpenter affirms 1 , build up tests 

 or casings of the most regular geometrical symmetry of form, and 

 of the most artificial construction. " From the very same sandy 

 bottom, one series picks up the coarser quartz grains, cements them 

 together with phosphate of iron secreted from its own substance, 

 and thus constructs a flask-shaped test having a short neck and a 

 single large orifice. Another picks up the finest grains and puts 

 them together with the same cement into perfectly spherical tests of 

 the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores 

 at regular intervals. Another selects the minutest sand-grains and 

 the terminal portions of sponge-spicules, and works these up together 

 — apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of the 

 1 ' Mental Physiology,' p. 41. 



