INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 469 
some other authors, that instinct is an immediate and 
constant impulse of the Deity; which, to omit other ob- 
vious objections, is sufficiently refuted by the fact, that 
animals in their instincts are sometimes at fault, and com- 
mit mistakes, which on the above supposition could not 
in any case happen.- 
The only doctrine on the subject of instinct requiring 
any thing like a formal refutation, is that which, con- 
tending for the identity of this faculty with reason in 
man, maintains that all the actions of animals, however 
complicated, are, like those of the human race, the re- 
sult of observation, invention, and experience. This 
theory, maintained by the sceptics, Pythagoras, Plato, 
and some other ancient philosophers, and in modern 
times by Helvetius, Condillac, and Smellie, has been 
by none more ingeniously supported than by Dr. Dar- 
win, who in the chapter treating on instinct, in the first 
volume of Zoonomza, has brought forward a collection 
of facts which give it a great air of plausibility. This 
plausibility, however, is merely superficial; and the re- 
sult of a rigorous examination by any competent judge 
is, that the greater part of Dr. Darwin’s facts bear more 
strongly in favour of the dissimilarity of instinct and rea- 
son than of their identity: and that those few which seem 
to support the latter position, are built upon the rela- 
tions of persons ignorant of natural history, who have 
confused together distinct species of animals. Thus, be- 
cause some anonymous informant told him that hive- 
bees when transported to Barbadoes, where there is no 
winter, ceased to lay up a store of honey, Dr. Darwin 
infers that all the operations of these insects are guided 
by reason and the adaptation of means to an end—a very 
