like a dog in hydrophobia, his eating or chewing grass like a ruminant in various forms of insanity.

It is both instructive and suggestive to compare current popular with modern scientific definitions of instinct. Popular, and especially theological, opinion has for ages delighted in representing instinct as

1. Perfect at birth. Whereas education is required, even in such so-called 'natural' acts as sucking the teat or otherwise seeking proper food. Spalding has shown that instinct is never perfect at birth, that its development is gradual, and that there is, therefore, progressive improvement in or of it.

2. Unerring or infallible. But our chapters on the 'Errors of Animals' show how frequent and glaring are the failures or mistakes of so-called instinct, how identical these errors are in kind with those of human reason, and how absurd it is to set up any such plea as infallibility on behalf of animal instinct.

3. Invariable or undeviating. Our chapters on Education' and 'Adaptiveness,' as well as other chapters, contain abundant evidence of the incessant and almost infinite variability or plasticity of instinct; and even in the present chapter it is desirable to make a few special remarks on the variations of instinct. The whole phenomena of improvability-as developed, for instance, by education-show how unfounded is man's belief in the invariableness of instinct.

4. Blind and independent of observation. But our chapter on 'Investigation '-including observation and experiment in and by the lower animals-shows that these animals are guided by impressions on vision and other senses just as much as man is, probably more so.

5. Independent of volition-involuntary or non-voluntary. But will is manifested among the very lowest animals, as is pointed out in the chapter on the Evolution of Mind in the Ascending Zoological Scale,' while every degree of strength of will is to be met with in such animals as the dog.

6. Independent of experience and instruction. But the chapters on Education' and its results prove that this supposed attribute of instinct is as fallacious as any of the others.

7. Without consciousness. But, on the one hand, consciousness occurs not only among the lowest animals, and even among plants, while, on the other, there are many socalled mental operations in man that take place in the absence of consciousness-such, for instance, as the phenomena of what is now called unconscious cerebration, and of cerebral, spinal, or nervous reflex or automatic action.

8. Without knowledge of the end in view. But it is shown in many parts of the present work that animals are actuated by very definite motives, and have very distinct purposes, objects, or aims in view.

9. Its object is simply the physical well-being of the individual—the preservation of the species. But the countless instances of sympathy and self-sacrifice-of life-saving of other animals, including man himself-emphatically contradict such an ungenerous and unjust assertion-one that, like so many others relating to animal instinct, we can scarcely believe to have been seriously propounded by any person acquainted with the character and habits of such an animal as the dog.

10. Beyond control. We know, however, that many animals in many ways exercise an amount of self-control that would do credit to man even in his highest states of civilisation.

11. Rapidity of action is such that there is no time for reflection. And yet we know that many animals-in proportion to their maturity or age, their experience and the necessity for the employment of such mental faculties-exercise reflection in the same ways and under the same circumstances that self-sufficient man himself does. They take time to consider the probable results or consequences of different lines of conduct, and after most mature deliberation-including the balancing of chances or probabilities-they resolve on a given course and carry it into effect.

12. Arising without effort-as impulses. But so do ideas and feelings of all kinds in the most intellectual man.

13. Without choice. But we know that, in an infinitude of ways, animals show preferences and make the most deliberate selections.

So much, then, for the current popular-and especially theological-conceptions of the character or attributes of animal instinct--conceptions that have for ages barred the way to all progress in comparative psychology. Modern scientific ideas may possibly constitute or create too great a reaction in a very opposite direction. The favourite conceptions of instinct formed and expressed by our most eminent naturalists—especially of the evolution school of thought—

are that

1. All instinct is what is shortly defined as inherited experience.' The idea implies that experience is acquired and transmitted, being accumulated, intensified, modified in the direction of improvement or otherwise, and organised in the transmission.

2. Instinct is only a lower or obscure kind or form of intelligence or reason.

3. Instinct is not a thing, power, faculty, per se, but only a mode of action common to all classes of mental aptitudes.

There is, no doubt, much that is true in all these modern views, but no one of them is unexceptionable. All are too sweeping in their generalisation. They aim at explaining and including all the phenomena of instinct; but they fail to do so, because the phenomena in question really belong to three different, though perhaps provisional, categoriesto wit

1. Phenomena already explained-or that are, or appear to be, capable of explanation-by the laws of heredity, habit, acquisition, knowledge, intelligence, or reason.

2. Phenomena that are unexplained at present, but which will probably, in the course of time, be as satisfactorily explained as those belonging to the preceding category; and—

3. Phenomena which, at present inexplicable, may long or always continue so.

That there are what may, with perfect propriety, be designated acquired-artificial, hereditary, inherited, or transmitted-instincts there can be no doubt. Such, for instance, are

1. The fear of man.

2. The dread of other enemies-as of the hawk by the

sparrow or chicken, the lion by the horse, Estride by horses, cattle, sheep, and reindeer.

3. Terror of fire, water, or other elements that are dangerous to life.

4. Barking-in the dog.

5. The finding of lost travellers by the St. Bernard breed of dogs.

6. The slave-keeping of Aphides by ants.

7. The sense of superiority, and its expression by obedience to leaders.

8. The moral sense as is pointed out in a special chapter. As regards any individual animal, however, such instincts may have been either congenital or acquired. They may have been originally acquired as knowledge, experience, or habit by some ancestor-intensified, modified, and transmitted through successive generations of offspring; in which case they become congenital in these offspring. Or they may have been acquired by the individual, as we constantly see taking place -for instance, as regards the dread of man and his instruments of destruction-in the birds of unvisited oceanic islands. But in this case we refer the acquired dread to knowledge or experience, because we see for ourselves its origin and growth; and it is only when a dread so acquired is transmitted to and through generations of offspring that are subject to a like experience, and when this natural fear appears at or immediately after birth in any such offspring, prior to the possible acquisition of experience by them, that we describe it as an instinct, as innate or intuitive, implanted by nature, not contributed or produced by experience.

It is frequently most difficult, if not impossible, in given cases to distinguish congenital from acquired aptitudes. One would suppose à priori that sucking the milk receptacle of a mother, or the selection of other suitable food, or the lapping of water or milk by the dog or cat, must be an 'innate' faculty; and yet we are assured by careful and conscientious experimentalists that these operations, with many others that appear to be congenitally instinctive or intuitive, are really acquired arts, the result of education and time.

It appears to me, in the present state of our knowledge of the inter-relations of, or confusion between, instinct and reason, convenient at least to assume that certain instincts are congenital, certain mental powers natural, innate, or instinctive. Such, for instance, are to be regarded the following instincts or groups thereof :—

1. The more purely physical ones of—

a. Hunger and thirst, including the so-called predatory or prey-catching instinct.

b. Self-preservation, or the love of life, including selfdefence and self-protection.

c. Pleasure and pain.

d. Sense of existence.

e. Physical comfort, such as that arising from warmth. f. Play or sport-playfulness, sportiveness, or friskiness in the young.

g. Migration.

h. Feeling of need of shelter or covering.

2. Those connected with external sensorial impressions, such as

a. Weather-forecasting.

b. Sense of locality and direction, with perhaps the power of way-finding.

3. Those connected with the sexual appetite, including pairing, propagation, and incubation.

4. Those connected with the social or family relationships, including

a. Adhesiveness, or the tendency to form attachments to person or place.

b. Love of society or companionship.

c. Longing for love and being loved, including maternal, parental, filial, and fraternal longings, yearnings, or affection.

d. Sympathy, compassion, or pity, charity or benevolence, with their opposites.

5. Destructiveness, including cruelty.

6. Acquisitiveness-the accumulation of property.

7. Combativeness.

8. Selfishness.