PROVISION FOR REARING THE YOUNG. II 5 



ment of their descendants, we must not necessarily 

 conclude that the species possess these instincts from 

 the beginning. They are not to be regarded as 

 mechanisms artfully wound up and functioning since 

 the appeaftnce of life on the earth with the same 

 inevitable regularity. The qualities which we find in 

 them were weak at first; they have developed in the 

 course of ages, and have finally, by heredity, been 

 impressed upon the creatures to manifest themselves 

 by necessary acts from which there is no longer any 

 escape. There is no need for surprise if we meet 

 to-day, I do not say among all, but among a very 

 large number of animals, this foresight for offspring 

 in a well-marked form. It is easy to understand that 

 the species that first acquired and fixed an instinct 

 propitious to the increase of the race has rapidly 

 prospered, stifling beneath its extension those that 

 are less favoured from this point of view, which is of 

 capital importance in a struggle for a place beneath 

 the sun. At the present day if the struggle of animal 

 life offers few facts of lack of foresight for the rearing 

 of young, it is because this defect has killed the races 

 who were subject to it; they have disappeared, or have 

 only been saved by qualities of another order. 



For the rest,, if it is difficult to reconstitute except 

 in imagination the different stages through which, in 

 time, and in a determined species, acts at first im- 

 perfect, but designed, have become perfect and 

 instinctive, we can at least find in space different 

 degrees of the same instinct in allied genera which 

 lead us by a succession of transitions from mechanical 

 action to reflective action. 



As I cannot quote all the facts showing this care 

 for the future, I will select a few. It must be said at 



