ON INSTINCT IN MAN AND ANIMALS. 203 
antennz contains thousands of nerve-fibres, which 
terminate in small open cells, and this Mr. Lowne 
believes to be the organ of smell, or of some other, 
perhaps new, sense. It is quite evident, therefore, 
that insects may possess senses which give them a 
knowledge of that which we can never perceive, and 
enable them to perform acts which to us are incom- 
prehensible. In the midst of this complete ignorance 
of their faculties and inner nature, is it wise for us 
to judge so boldly of their powers by a comparison 
with our own? How can we pretend to fathom the 
profound mystery of their mental nature, and decide 
what, and how much, they can perceive or remem- 
ber, reason or reflect! To leap at one bound from 
our own consciousness to that of an insect’s, is as 
unreasonable and absurd as if, with a pretty good 
knowledge of the multiplication table, we were to 
go straight to the study of the calculus of functions, 
or as if our comparative anatomists should pass from 
the study of man’s bony structure to that of the fish, 
and, without any knowledge of the numerous inter- 
mediate forms, were to attempt to determine the homo- 
logies between these distant types of vertebrata. In 
such a case would not error be inevitable, and would 
not continued study in the same direction only render 
the erroneous conclusions more ingrained and more 
irremovable. 
Definition of Instinct. 
Before going further into this subject, we must 
