6088 



Reason and Instinct. 



law of man's nature from the earliest period of his history ; a law 

 subject to modification under the various circumstances and exi- 

 gencies of the race variously modified at various epochs and 

 localities ; but yet in its great root and principle essentially the same 

 as impels the swallow, the crane, the woodcock, the lemming, the rat, 

 the salmon, to their annual, or periodical, or occasional journeys of 

 removal from old, but no longer fitting scenes and episodes of life, to 

 others newer and replete with the requisites which had sustained, or 

 were about to sustain, failure in the old. As the family of man in 

 the elder ages of human life received ever-continued accessions, and 

 the non-existence of sources of proportionate decrease made each 

 accession an almost positive gain in population, tribes that were off- 

 shoots of the parent tribe must have been thrown off in all directions; 

 and from these again, as new centres of the globe-peopling process, 

 others newer went forth into the heretofore untrod, untried wastes of 

 Creation. True, at the Flood, such comparatively limited portions 

 of the earth's surface as had owned the hand of its human lord were 

 again depopulated ; but only for the repeopling process to go on 

 with a rapidity before unrealised even in idea. And before long, 

 numerous families, each family already a tribe in miniature, pushed 

 their way and their fortunes into every portion of the world, exploring 

 in every quarter scenes and countries hitherto unvisited and unseen 

 by mortal foot or eye. Then the Tower of Babel heard the already 

 recognised law of migration authoritatively promulgated — beheld it 

 branded into the living tablets of human nature. And the law has 

 never yet become effete. No portion of it has been annulled. Its 

 operation — certainly never for long even suspended — has never 

 ceased to afford evident tokens of its continuance. Look at the 

 "Great Migration," as it is called, which Europe saw before the 

 mediaeval times, the colonizations of still and much earlier periods, the 

 irruptions of huge hordes of fierce herdsmen-warriors in many an 

 age and many a country in Asia and Africa, upon lands and labours 

 they knew not of, except it were by a dim, dreamy hearsay, myth-like 

 both in its vague dimness and its fundamental element and substratum 

 of truth. These illustrations of the Instinct which impels — I use the 

 word advisedly, which impels — the human species to migration from 

 the scene of failing capabilities and resources to newer ones of 

 abundant supplies and exceeding susceptibility of development, are 

 as numerous as the ages which have looked upon man's existence, as 

 striking as the succession of scenes that have been ever newly pre- 

 sented to his wondering gaze as he has been again and yet again 



