THE UNSEEN GOAL 273 
Similarly, the digger-wasp that shows elaborate 
parental care, securing the safety and success of 
young which are never seen, does so because it 
belongs to a race in which rearing the young and 
perhaps enjoying their company was long ago the 
rule. The internal voice that the creature obeys 
is the reverberation of a distant past. 
When we try to picture the establishment of an 
instinctive routine we naturally think of the creature 
wrinkling its brows from step to step, and from 
generation to generation deliberately introducing 
little improvements, until the behavior becomes 
at length, like a patent, extraordinarily perfect. 
We naturally picture the process in this way, for 
it is thus that we improve on our manipulations. 
Now without denying that animals of the small- 
brained instinctive type may better their behavior 
by individual improvements, more or less intelli- 
gent, we cannot believe that it was in this way that 
instinctive behavior became established. Who, 
indeed, shall dogmatize as to the impossibility of 
individual experiences affecting the entailed in- 
heritance of the race, or set limits to the “ mysterious 
wireless telegraphy of ante-natal life’’; but it does 
not seem likely that instinctive behavior is in 
any direct way due to the transmission of the results 
of the experiments made by the individual. Often, 
for instance, a very effective piece of behavior 
is performed only once in a lifetime, which does 
not give much opportunity for heritable imprinting. 
Often, again, the behavior is connected with the 
