WAYS OF NATURE 
self-preservation, or to the continuance of its species, 
it probably does not think about it as a person would, 
any more than the plant or tree thinks about the 
light when it bends toward it, or about the moisture 
when it sends down its tap-root. Touch the tail of 
a porcupine ever so lightly, and it springs up like a 
trap and your hand is stuck with quills. I do not 
suppose there is any more thinking about the act, or 
any more conscious exercise of will-power, than there 
is in a trap. An outward stimulus is applied and the 
reaction is quick. Does not man wink, and dodge, 
and sneeze, and laugh, and cry, and blush, and fall in 
love, and do many other things without thought or 
will? I do not suppose the birds think about migrat- 
ing, as man does when he migrates; they simply obey 
an inborn impulse to move south or north, as the 
case may be. They do not think about the great 
lights upon the coast that blaze out with a fatal fas- 
cination in their midnight paths. If they had inde- 
pendent powers of thought, they would avoid them. 
But the lighthouse is comparatively a new thing in 
the life of birds, and instinct has not yet taught them 
to avoid it. To adapt means to an end is an act of 
intelligence, but that intelligence may be inborn and 
instinctive as in the animals, or it may be acquired 
and therefore rational as in man. 
“Surely,” said a woman to me, “ when a cat sits 
watching at a mouse-hole, she has some image in her 
mind of the mouse in its hole?” Not in any such 
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