278 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



superiority of instinct is obvious — instinct is the result of continued 

 selections from the experiences of countless generations, whilst reason is 

 only the experience acquired during the brief lifetime of a single 

 individual. It is not surprising then that instinct so vastly transcends 

 the intellectual power of the animal that exhibits it. I think that we 

 may look for the development of human instinct when most of our 

 individual experience or knowledge has become hereditary. At present 

 only the capacity for acquiring knowledge is inherited among human 

 beings, but, judging from the facts above considered, knowledge itself 

 must in time be inherited also. So far from supposing then that we 

 have lost our instincts through civilisation, I do not think that they 

 have yet been evolved. Now nearly all our results have to be attained 

 by long training and laborious mental calculations, but in the future 

 we may hope to arrive at far greater results by almost unconscious 

 instinctive processes. 



Mr. Phillips said he disagreed with the author as regards the 

 hereditary instinct of animals ; he believed that animals and man 

 derived their intelligence in constructive ability in a similar manner 

 from a l: Common Vital Force," a subject on which he had written a 

 paper before the Society a short time ago. He did not agree to place 

 everything to evolution. A spider's web is superior to anything that 

 man can construct, — there is a force in nature given to man or insects 

 which is equal and not necessarily hereditary. 



Mr. Maskell said he was obliged to dissent from the conclusions of 

 the paper. Whatever the reality might be of the three or four facts 

 given by Mr. Hudson, they seemed entirely insufficient to form a basis 

 for a theory of instinct such as was proposed. For example, in the 

 case of the falling insect mentioned. Mr. Hudson adduced this as an 

 instance clearly |>ointing to acquired faculties, the result of long series 

 of minute variations and progress. But the case was of extreme 

 weakness unless Mr. Hudson was prepared to assert, of his own 

 knowledge, that the remote ancestor of this moth, the very first of the 

 race, did not do precisely the same thing. Assuming (what did not 

 seem to be proved) that the moth which fell on this occasion did so 

 from fright : assuming that a moth could see far enough to detect an 

 approaching enemy (also not proved), how could anyone say that the 

 very first created moth of the species did not do the same thing under 

 similar conditions? And if it did, where would the progressive 

 inherited variation leading to the instinct of the moth now referred to 

 come in ? The foundation of theories tending to sap and destroy the 

 first principles of human belief, on such vague and unproved assertions 

 as those of the paper, is mischievous in the extreme, and the speaker 

 regretted that so many young students of the present day were apt to 

 give way to the temptation of indulging in them. 



Sir Walter Buller said he was somewhat disappointed with Mr. 

 Hudson's paper, because its ambitious title had led him to expect much 

 more than it gave in the way of original research. He could not 

 conceive of a more fruitful suhject than the one selected by this author ; 

 but instead of the large array of facts from his own experience one 



