i88 3 J 
Canine Intelligence . 
735 
ready for immediate adtion. There is no learning to suck. 
And here we come upon a second definition of instindtive 
adtion as that which need not be learnt , which comes natural 
as we say. But to be a true instindt it must come natural 
not to the individual only, but to the species. The word 
instinct , however, is, like a good many others, — reason, 
sensation, perception, and the like, — extremely indefinite. 
In such cases the only thing to do is to note the want of 
definition, and to be on our guard against such confusion as 
is likely to arise therefrom. Instindtive adtion, then, in its 
broader sense is automatic adtion, adtion performed without 
any consciousness of choice. Instindt in the narrower sense is 
habit which through inheritance comes natural to a species. 
The babe and the pup come into the world in such a help- 
less condition that this suckling instindt is perhaps the only 
one ready for immediate use, the only one possible to their 
connate mechanism. Some other creatures, however, make 
their first appearance with a far more developed connate 
mechanism. Everyone who has seen a litter of newly born 
piglings must have been struck by the lively and cheerful 
adtivity they at once display. When two or three minutes 
old they will find their way from one side-of the sty to the 
other, making diredtly for their mother, guided by her help- 
ful grunts. Mr. D. A. Spalding, by way of experiment, put 
a little pig in a bag the moment it was born, and kept it 
there in the dark until it was seven hours old. “ I then 
placed it,” he writes, “ outside the sty, at a distance of ten 
feet from where the sow lay concealed inside the house. 
The pig soon recognised the low grunting of its mother, and 
went along outside the sty, struggling to get under or over 
the lower bar. At the end of five minutes it succeeded in 
forcing itself through, under the bar, at one of the few 
places where that was possible. No sooner in than it went 
without a pause into the pig-house to its mother, and was 
at once like the rest in its behaviour.” 
The hippopotamus seems to be quite as well off, on making 
his debut in the world, as his cousin. Thunberg, the South 
African traveller, relates, on the testimony of an experienced 
hunter, the case of a female hippopotamus who was shot 
the moment she had given birth to a son and heir. “ The 
Hottentots,” he says, “ who imagined that after this they 
could catch the calf alive, immediately rushed out of their 
hiding-place to lay hold of it, but, though there were several 
of them, the new-born calf got away from them, and at once 
made the best of its way to the river.” 
To the question whether the performance of these in- 
