INSTINCT OF INSECIS. 537 
were accurate; but that it is not so is known to every naturalist acquainted 
with the fact that many different species of bees store up honey in the 
hottest climates ; and that there is no authentic instance on record of the 
hive-bees altering, in any age or climate, their peculiar operations, which 
are now in the coldest and in the hottest regions precisely what they were 
in Greece in the time of Aristotle, and in Italy in the days of Virgil. In- 
deed the single fact, depending on the assertions of such accurate observers 
as Reaumur and Swammerdam, that a bee as soon after it is disclosed from 
the pupa as its body is dried and its wings expanded, and before it is pos- 
sible that it should have received any instruction, betakes itself to the 
collecting of honey or the fabrication of a cell, which operation it performs 
as adroitly as the most hoary inhabitant of the hive, is alone sufficient to 
set aside all the hearsay statements of Dr. Darwin, and should have led 
him, as it must every logical reasoner, to the conclusion, that these and 
similar actions of animals cannot be referred to any reasoning process, nor 
be deemed the result of observation and experience. It is true, it does not 
follow that animals, besides instinct, have not, in a degree, the faculty of 
reason also; and as I shall in the sequel endeavour to show, many of the 
actions of insects can be adequately explained on no other supposition. 
But to deny, as Dr. Darwin does, that the art with which the caterpillar 
weaves its cocoon, or the unerring care with which the moth places her 
eggs upon food that she herself can never use, are the effects of instinct, 
is as unphilosophical and contrary to fact as to insist that the eagerness 
with which, though it has never tasted milk, the infant seeks for its mother’s 
breast, is the effect of reason. ; 
Instinct, then, is zof the result of a plastic nature; of a system of ma- 
chinery; of diseased bodily action ; of models impressed on the brain ; nor 
of organic shootings-out :—it is not the éffect of the habitual determination 
for ages of the nervous fluid to certain organs; nor is it either the impulse 
of the Deity, or reason. Without pretending to give a logical definition of 
it, which, while we are ignorant of the essence of reason, 1s impossible, we 
may call the instincts of animals those unknown faculties implanted in their 
constitution by the Creator, by which, independent of instruction, obser- 
vation, or experience, and without a knowledge of the end in view, they 
are impelled to the performance of certain actions tending to the well-being 
of the individual and the preservation of the species: and with this de- 
scription, which is, in fact, merely a confession of ignorance, we must, in 
the present state of metaphysical science, content ourselves. 
I here say nothing of that supposed connection of the instinct of animals 
with their sensations, which has been introduced into many definitions of 
this mysterious power, for two reasons. In the first place, this definition 
merely sets the world upon the tortoise; for what do we know more than 
before about the nature of instinct, when we have called it, with Brown, a 
predisposition to certain actions when certain sensations exist, or with 
Tucker lave ascribed it to the operation of the senses, or to that internal 
feeling called appetite? But, secondly, this connection of instinct with 
bodily sensation, though probable enough in some instances, is by no means 
generally evident. We may explain in this way the instincts connected 
with hunger and the sexual passion, and some other particular facts, as the 
laying of the eggs of the flesh-fly in the flowers of Stapelia hirsuta, instead 
of in carrion, their proper nidus, and of those of the common house-fly in 
