1 6 Habit and Instinct. 



fleshy grub, so organized as to float on the surface of the 

 honey, with the mouth beneath and the spiracles above 

 the surface. ... In this state it remains until the honey 

 is consumed," and, after some further metamorphoses, 

 develops into a perfect beetle in August. 



Here, then, we have a curious and marvellously 

 adaptive life-history, with specialized changes of form and 

 structure, and with correlated modes of activity at each 

 stage. How comes it to perform its varied activities, each 

 step of which is so well adapted to the needs of the stage 

 of life on which it is entering ? Parental teaching is 

 altogether excluded, for the parent never sees her offspring ; 

 each individual is isolated from others of its kind, so that 

 imitation is also excluded. The activities cannot be per- 

 formed through intelligence in the common acceptation 

 of the word, for intelligence involves the profiting by 

 individual experience. The larva cannot fasten upon the 

 drone as the result of any previous experience, since it has 

 never done anything of the sort before ; nor can it pass to 

 the female bee because experience has taught it that such 

 a procedure brings with it satisfactory consequences. At no 

 stage of the complex process can intelligence, based upon 

 individual experience, be admitted as a factor. If there be 

 experience, it must be the inherited experience of ancestors 

 who have, each in turn, done much the same. Whether 

 we are justified in speaking of inherited experience will 

 be considered in due time. In any case, the procedure, 

 which is typically instinctive in its nature, has its foun- 

 dations in heredity. 



We here touch the very quick of the subject. As we 

 shall use the term, the truly instinctive activity is 

 characterized by a certain amount of definiteness which 

 is hereditary, and which is not acquired in the course of 

 individual experience. A habit, as such, is not, in the 



