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REVIEW — ILLUSTRATIONS OF INSTINCT. 
tribunal of same kind called the Crow Court ; but, according to Dr. 
Edmonson, in his View of the Shetlands Islands, its proceedings 
are as authoritative and regular ; and it is remarkable as occurring 
in a species ( Corvus cornix) so near akin to the rook. The Crow 
Court is a sort of general assembly of birds who, in their usual 
habits, are accustomed to live in pairs, scattered at great distances 
from each other; and when they visit the south or west of England, 
as they do in severe winters, they are commonly solitary. In their 
summer haunts in the Shetland Islands, numbers meet together 
from different points, on a particular hill or field ; and on these 
occasions the assembly is not complete, and does not begin its 
business, for a day or two, till, all the deputies having arrived, a 
general clamour and croaking ensue, and the whole of the court — 
judges, barristers, ushers, audience and all, fall upon the two or 
three prisoners at the bar, and beat them till they kill them. When 
this is accomplished, the court breaks up, and quietly disperses.” 
“ A great number of cases, having a similar impress of the exer- 
cise of a sense of justice, might be adduced from long observation 
of many kinds of animals, which would forcibly illustrate the views 
which some philosophers have taken of the nature of morals, ac- 
cording to whom the virtue or righteousness of an action in the 
individual consists almost wholly in its utility to the community 
of which he forms a part, as distinguished from that which in motive 
and purity is moral and universal. This simply utilitarian virtue 
in some animals, in other races, and still more in the human race, 
would become the worst of vice, of badness, and madness ; and 
destroy the only true distinction between what is most to be com- 
mended as good, and what is most to be detested as vile.” 
This is the concluding paragraph of the work. The copious and 
varied extracts we have made will put our readers fully into the 
possession of Mr. Couch’s views of the mysterious faculty of in- 
stinct. They will find, he has traced its rise in organic life, and 
exhibited it in a progressive condition of development according 
as sensibility was added to simple automatic existence, and intel- 
lectuality was engrafted upon sensibility. Innate appetites and 
passions in animals are, in his view of the subject, but so many 
instincts. We have in fish as well as birds the instinct of 
making nests for their ova , and in the latter the wonderful instinct 
of periodical migration. While in many beasts, instinct in some 
of its forms is exhibited so closely allied to what we can call by 
no other name than reason that the best explanation we can offer 
to such impulses probably is to say with our author, that, in pro- 
portion as the reasoning faculty is found to exist in brutes, “ its 
sole appropriation is as the servant of instinct ;” whereas, in 
man, in direct opposition to this, “ the instincts (appetites and pas- 
