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we find that there is this distinction between man’s intellect and the intellect , 
if yon will so call it, or the intelligence or the instinct of other animals, that 
they were created with their instincts perfect, and required no instruction, no 
bringing out, no improvement of any kind. As they were created, so they are 
now. We find amongst the simplest and the humblest of God’s creatures that 
their instincts have anticipated some of the greatest inventions and discoveries 
of man. Before Archimedes was a mathematician, before logarithms were 
invented, the bee was the great geometrician. When we were in want of 
materials for paper, we went to the wasp to be instructed, and found it making 
paper out of dry wood. We thought we had made a discovery in aeronautics, 
but we found that we had been anticipated by the little spider. Another 
spider anticipated the invention of the diving bell. All this proves that . 
it is possible for beings to be created with perfect instincts, and that there- 
fore it is possible for such a thing as a perfect man to have been created. If 
we have perfect insects created, with all their faculties at once appearing 
bright, clear, and beautiful, I say man might have been— I don’t say he was 
—created perfect ; and that he might have degenerated, for he has the power 
to lose knowledge as well as to acquire it. I do not think that men ought 
to shrink from expressing their opinion upon a matter, as to whether it is 
religious or whether it is not, when they do not do it in the spirit of calling 
names, and they ought to be allowed to protest against theories which 
they do not believe to be true, without being charged with being unchristian 
and uncharitable in the interpretation which they put upon them. There is 
another thing which I think has a remarkable, bearing on the question. 
That is, when a man is raised to a high point of civilization he forgets a 
vast amount of the instinctive faculties he possesses. As science advances, 
he is better able to interpret great facts in nature ; and it is by these facts 
that he begins to learn what instincts he unknowingly possesses. How is it 
that one class of men in one part of the world have discovered that the leaf 
of a certain tree dried and formed into tea makes a very valuable article 
of food ? How is it that in another quarter of the globe men have discovered 
that the fruit of another tree (coffee) roasted and ground produces an article 
of food which has the very same effect on their constitution ? How is it that 
another set of men have discovered the value of cocoa ? How is it that 
these things have been ascertained ? What could have guided men in 
their selection of these things ? They are substances without taste or any 
other sensible property in common. Everything was so naturally adverse 
to the gamut of which Professor Byrne has spoken ; and yet, if we come to 
a chemical analysis, we find that they all contain the same kind of substance, 
and that is a certain vegetable alkaloid, of an isomeric character. 0 
them contain the same elements, combined together in the same proportion. 
How is it that men instinctively arrived at that knowledge ? And if man 
has such subtle instincts as these, has he not other higher instmcts . Is 
not poetry a subtle instinct ? Is not the power of reasoning a subtle instinct . 
Is not geometry founded upon the most subtle instincts of the human mine . 
we to deny all that ? Again to recur to the instructive use of coffee and 
