INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 569 



agonal cells of bees are produced by the reciprocal pressure of the cylin- 

 drical bodies of these insects against each other I !^ 



Nor is it requisite to advert at length to the explanations of instinctive 

 actions more recently given by Stefiens, a German author (one of the 

 trancendentahsts, I conclude, from the incomprehensibility of his book to 

 my ordinary intellect), who says that the products of the vaunted instinct 

 of insects are nothing but " shootings out of inorganic animal masses " 

 (anorgische ansch'ussey ; and by Lamarck^, who attributes them to certain 

 inherent inclinations arising from habits impressed upon the organs of the 

 animals concerned in producing them, by the constant efflux towards these 

 organs of the nervous fluid, which, during a series of ages, has been dis- 

 placed in their endeavors to perform certain actions which their necessities 

 have given birth to. The mere statement of a hypothesis of which the 

 enunciation is nearly unintelligible, and built upon the assumption of the 

 presence of an unseen fluid, and of the existence of the animal some 

 millions of years, is quite sufficient, and would even be unnecessary if it 

 were not of such late origin. Neither shall I detain you with any formal 

 consideration of the hypothesis advanced by Addison and some other 

 authors, that instinct is an immediate and constant impulse of the Deity ; 

 which, to omit other obvious objections, is sufficiently refuted by the fact, 

 that animals in their instincts are sometimes at fault, and commit mistakes, 

 which on the above supposition could not in any case happen. 



The only doctrine on the subject of instinct requiring any thing like a 

 formal refutation is that which, contending for the identity of this faculty 

 with reason in man, maintains that all the actions of animals, however 

 complicated, are, like those of the human race, the result of observation, 

 invention, and experience. This theory, maintained by the sceptics, 

 Pythagoras, Plato, and some other ancient philosophers, and in modern 

 times by Helvetius, Condillac, and Smellie, has been by none more inge- 

 niously supported than by Dr. Darwin, who in the chapter treating on 

 instinct, in the first volume of his Zoonomia, has brought forward a collec- 

 tion of facts which give it a great air of plausibility. This plausibility, 

 however, is merely superficial ; and the result of a rigorous examination 

 by any competent judge is, that the greater part of Dr. Darwin's facts 

 bear more strongly in favor of the dissimilarity of instinct and reason than 

 of their identity : and that those few which seem to support the latter 

 position are built upon the relations of persons ignorant of natural history, 

 who have confused together distinct species of animals. Thus, because 

 some anonymous informant told hira that hive-bees when transported to 

 Barbadoes, where there is no winter, ceased to lay up a store of honey, 

 Dr. Darwin infers that all the operations of these insects are guided by 

 reason and the adaptation of means to an end — a very just inference, if the 

 statement from which it is drawn were accurate ; but that it is not so is 

 known to every naturalist acquainted with the fact that many different 



« Hist. Nat. Edit. 1785, v. 277. 



' BeitT&ge zm innern Naturgeschichte der Erde, 1801, p. 298. 



' In his Philosophie Z-jologique, Paris. 1809 (ii. 325.) — a work which every zoologist will, 

 I think, join wiih me in regretting should be devoted to metaphysical disquisitions built on 

 the most gratuitous assumptions, instead of comprising that luminous generalization of 

 facts relative to the animal world which is so great a desideratum, and for performing which 

 satisfactorily this emineat naturalist is so well qualified. 



48* 



