Dr. Roger s Position. i8g 



aphides. Little by little this relation has ceased, 

 until the animals found in anthills to-day have be- 

 come traditional parasites, tolerated through the iner- 

 tia of custom on account of the services formerly 

 rendered by their ancestors." ■■' 



This is a very good speculative guess instead of a 

 satisfactory explanation ; and if it is not well-found, 

 it is, at all events, suggestive of how close, according 

 to Professor Van Beneden, is insect parasitism to the 

 inert outstanding cases of filthy human parasitism — 

 such, for instance, as the "bearers of the king's 

 stools " in pre-revolutionary France, and the exis- 

 tence, up to a certain day when it was commuted for 

 nigh ;^20,ooo, of a master of the falcons in England 

 and to-day of a master of the buckhounds. How 

 near human nature runs to insect and other nature ! 

 Here the perverted instinct of Englishmen leads 

 them not only to tolerate parasites, but to bow down 

 before them as the Egyptians of old before the dung- 

 beetle ! 



In the case of the little birds and cuckoos we have 

 had brought before us in the actions of the former 

 what is decisively in the teeth of pre-Darwinian 

 theory as of the Darwinian. Thus Dr. Roget put it 

 that " the individual and the species were preserved 

 not by slow and uncertain calculations of prudence, 

 but by innate faculties, prompted by an unerring im- 

 pulse to the performance of the actions required for 

 those ends."t It is something to find an instance and 

 argument that equally runs directly counter to both ! 

 But, on this reasoning, the inevitable act of the small 



* Animal Parasitism, p. 117. 

 \ Bridgwater Treatise, ii, p. 514. 



