MEETINGS OF SOCIETIES. 2/7 



live in quite another world than ours, so far as impression produced by 

 the senses is concerned ; that phenomena which appear beautiful or 

 terrifying to us make no impression upon them, and that knowledge 

 which to us is a sealed book may be to them as an open scroll. The 

 sense of touch in human beings is absolutely null and void compared 

 with that sense in the ant which almost certainly communicates intelli- 

 gibly with its fellows by means of contacting antenna?, while the sense 

 of smell in civilized man is almost as feeble as it is useless. It is quite 

 conceivable that other creatures have other senses the effects of which 

 are no more to be appreciated by us than the tints of a landscape or a 

 flower would be by a blind man. 



Mr. Carlile, in reply, said he found he had not been wrong in his 

 anticipation that his instances of animal intelligence would be capped 

 by others drawn from the recollections of other gentlemen present. He 

 could not see how Mr. Harding's view that what appeared to be results 

 of hereditary memory could square with the facts. The qualities of a 

 thing were simply the impressions it made on the senses, its colour, 

 smell, and so on, and to say that the horror which a New Zealand 

 bred horse felt for what looked like a snake was possibly not owing to 

 hereditary memory to the horse's perceptions of some — to us occult 

 quality — conveyed no meaning to his mind. The theory of an inverse 

 ratio between instinct and reason, started, he thought, by Sir W. 

 Hamilton, accorded with some of the facts of natural history, but was 

 far from being true universally. He cited from Wallace's " Malay 

 Archipelago," what seemed an instance in point of its truth. A baby 

 orang-outang which they captured, belonging as it did to the anthro- 

 pomorphous apes, showed all the characteristics of the human baby as 

 regarded its utter helplessness, the result being that its captors nursed 

 and tended it and became greatly attached to it. The young of 

 monkeys lower down in the intellectual scale were much more capable 

 of taking care of themselves at an eirly age. 



Wellington, 9th September, 1891— W. L. Travers Esq., F.L.S., (in 

 absence of the President) in the chair. 

 New Member.— Mi-. P. T. Turnbull. 



Papers. — (1) " Instances of Instinct in Insects," by G. V. Hudson, 

 F.E.S. (Abstract.) This paper was an account of a lew recently 

 observed instincts in insects, chiefly borrowed from the " Entomologists' 

 Monthly Magazine." The author attributed the remarkable faculties 

 ■exhibited to the action of natural selection and inheritance, and 

 endeavoured to explain how beneficial variations in structure and 

 instinct might be eventually perfected by these two forces. In the 

 concluding portion of the paper the differences between reason and 

 instinct were thus dealt with. 



During the discussion which followed the reading of Mr. Carlile's 

 paper, Mr. Harding contrasted instinct and reason, and showed how, in 

 many respects, the former attribute was superior to the latter. If it is 

 admitted that instinct is the inherited experience of the race whilst 

 reason is that of the individual only, then the explanation of the 



