THE INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 
17 
usual cost of which is one dollar per lens, is all that is usually required. 
Jt is a common mistake to suppose that insects cannot be studied and 
classified without the use of a complex and costly microscope. Such 
instruments are useful only to examine excessively minute or transpa- 
rent objects, and though sometimes indispensable to the professional 
entomologist, they are rarely used in the ordinary study of insects. 
THE INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 
Instinct is that faculty by which animals are enabled to discover their 
food, construct their nests, and provide for their young, and to perform 
these operations without having had any previous education or experi- 
ence. Many of the manifestations of this faculty are truly wonderful 
and unaccountable. Such are the mathematically accurate construction 
of the cells of the honey comb ; the curious economy of the ants and 
bees ; and the provisions which many kinds of insects make for the fu- 
ture subsistence of their young, even in advance of their existence. 
Instinct is often spoken of as an imperfect or partially developed rea- 
son, but its relation to that faculty can be, at most, only that of a very 
remote analogy. It differs from reason in its invariableness and its al- 
most absolute infallibility, but most essentially in its independency of 
previous knowledge and experience. Reason acts only by virtue of what 
is already known, and man, who vastly excells all other animals in his 
reasoning powers, approaches perfection in any complex work only by 
long study and practice ; the honey-bee, on the contrary, constructs its 
first cell with such mathematical accuracy that it cannot be improved 
by any subsequent experience. 
Some of the higher animals, such as the horse and the dog, give proof 
of the possession of a reasoning faculty similar to our own, and inferior 
only in degree. But whilst the manifestations of reason are fainter as 
we descend in the animal scale, instinct becomes more remarkable, and 
in insects especially, in which reason is almost if not absolutely wanting, 
instinct is exhibited in its highest perfection, far surpassing, in many 
instances, in accuracy and prescience, the reason of man himself. 
Of the nature of the instinct of animals, as of that of the human 
mind, we know absolutely nothing; and we can only confess our igno- 
rance by referring its wonderful manifestations to the direct agency of 
the Creator. 
INSECTS FROM A PRACTICAL OR ECONOMIC POINT OF VIEW. 
In regarding insects from this poiut of view, we have to consider 
them in both their beneficial and their injurious relations. The directly 
beneficial insects are almost limited to the three well-kuown species : 
the honey-bee, the silk- worm and the cochineal-insect ; whereas, those 
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