Characters, Hereditary and Acquired. 89 



out of merely fortuitous variations — there being, by 

 hypothesis, nothing to determine variations of an 

 insect's mind in the direction of stinging caterpillars 

 only in these nine intensely localized spots ^. 



Again, there are not a few instincts which appear 

 to be wholly useless to their possessors, and others 

 again which appear to be even deleterious. The 

 dusting over of their excrement by certain freely- 

 roaming carnivora ; the choice by certain herbivora 

 of particular places on which to void their urine, or 

 in which to die ; the howling of wolves at the moon ; 

 purring of cats, &c., under pleasurable emotion ; and 

 sundry other hereditary actions of the same appar- 

 ently unmeaning kind, all admit of being readily 

 accounted for as useless habits originally acquired 

 in various ways, and afterwards perpetuated by 

 heredity, because not sufficiently deleterious to have 

 been stamped out by natural selection ^ But it does 

 not seem possible to explain them by survival of the 

 fittest in the struggle for existence. 



Finally, in the case of our own species, it is self- 

 evident that the aesthetic, moral, and religious instincts 

 admit of a natural and easy explanation on the 

 hypothesis of use-inheritance, while such is by no 

 means the case if that hypothesis is rejected. Our 

 emotions of the ludicrous, of the beautiful, and of the 

 sublime, appear to be of the nature of hereditary 

 instincts ; and be this as it may, it would further 

 appear that, whatever else they may be, they are 

 certainly not of a life-preserving character. And 



• Note B. 



' For fuller treatment see Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 274-285, 



378-379. 381-383- 



