him to return to his own door by a mathematically straight line. The bee will do so, but a man's path under such circumstances would probably be rather crooked. And the difference between them cannot be explained on the supposition of the insect's greater sharpness of vision; let the hive be in the midst of a vast forest, so that the intervening trees hide it when one is a rod off in any direction, and the bee still flies straight to its home.

The consideration of this manifest preeminence of instinct in its limited sphere over reason was necessary in order to put in a proper light the next peculiarity of it which we have to notice, and which certainly divides it by a very broad line from any thing in the mental constitution of man. Instinct is limited to a very few ends, mostly to those which are essential for the preservation of the animal itself or of its species. It works in a prescribed and narrow path, to accomplish these purposes and no others; its methods are invariable, or nearly so, its power of adapting itself to circumstances being confined within a very narrow range. Beyond these limits, it is powerless. Take the animal out of its sphere, and its mental endowments cease to be even comparable with those of man; it falls infinitely far below him. The bee, which in its own sphere is wiser than a Euclid or an Arkwright, is, when compelled to labor for any other purpose than that for which nature has specifically adapted it, more stupid than an idiot. If one accidentally flies into a room through the lower half of an open window, and, seeking to return, happens to strike against the glass above, it will continue buzzing about and knocking its head against the same pane oftentimes for an hour, though it would find free egress a few inches below. The hen shows great apparent sagacity, during the period of incubation, in preserving the egg from cold or harm of any kind, and, when due time arrives, in assisting the chick to break out of its prison; but she mistakes a piece of chalk for an egg, and sits upon it in the same manner; she heeds not any change in the number of her eggs; and if one of another species be placed in the nest, she cherishes the little stranger, when hatched, with as much care as she shows for her own offspring. In fact, the natural affection of birds, and even of many quadrupeds, for their young is quite blind. A cheat may easily be put upon them, and they may even be deceived into nourishing those that are

Cats have been found

naturally their deadliest enemies. suckling young rats, a fact which shows the stupidity both of the foster mother and the nursling.

Nothing can be more unlike the action of human reason than such incongruities. The pliability of the mind, its astonishing power of adapting itself to circumstances, is one of its most marvellous attributes. Sagacity shown in one direction is a good test of general ability for all occasions. Increased facility in performing particular tasks may, indeed, be acquired by habit; but the mind is master also of its own habits, forming or destroying them at pleasure. A great deal of nonsense is uttered about men being born for particular employments; and this is said with reference not merely to what is an undoubted fact, the unequal measure of general talent possessed by different individuals, but to a supposed innate bias of that talent towards a particular task. That popular humbug, phrenology, has had a great share in perpetuating this erroneous doctrine, if not in giving birth to it, as well as to many others of the same class. We hold, with Dr. Johnson, that the true genius is a mind of large natural powers accidentally determined in a particular direction. The greatest general of ancient times showed himself also one of the greatest historians; and in our own day, England's most illustrious captain is also her wisest statesman. Posterity will probably rank the civic abilities of Napoleon even higher than his military genius. At this time, the prime minister of France is her most philosophical historian, and his competitors in politics are a distinguished poet and an eminent journalist.

Not so in the orderly little communities of the ant and the bee. The soldiers and the workers have their appointed tasks from the first moment of their existence, and never change their professions. The drones are born sluggards. The queen emerges from the pupa with the crown already on her head; she was fed with royal food while still only a worm. After her birth, like a true sovereign, she does nothing but lay eggs and fight, while her subjects support her. And this law of the invariability of instinct holds throughout the animal kingdom. In all that goes beyond the mere sensations of the present moment, in every thing that relates to the future, and therefore requires the use of means, which in a human being would imply sagacity and foresight, the several classes

of brutes do one thing in only one way. Following that narrow path, they appear like prodigies of wisdom; remove them ever so little from it, and they again become brutes. In this respect, the parallel between the human and the brute mind fails entirely; instinct is no longer to be compared with reason, but with a machine. The analogy here is perfect; a jenny or a mule can spin yarn much better than man could with the aid only of his fingers; but it cannot card, weave, or dress; it can do nothing but spin. A machine performs a single task, usually with wonderful speed, neatness, and precision; but its utility is limited to this one purpose. So a bee constructs its combs with admirable art; but it cannot build a hive, or a house for these combs. If man does not come to its aid with a properly fashioned hive, it will use the hollow of a decayed tree, or some other less convenient receptable. The wasp, on the other hand, builds not only its combs, but a house to cover them with, and it manufactured paper for these purposes many centuries before man learned how to make it. Neither the wasp nor the bee can dig subterranean chambers for its home, as the ant does; but the latter cannot manufacture paper, nor construct combs. Each of these animals, indeed, can perform several tasks of its own; just like a complex machine, which cuts the wire, sharpens it, and affixes a head to the pin, doing all, as it were, by a single volition. The operation is complex, but invariable.

We do not say that instinct is the action of a machine, but only that it resembles one more nearly than it does the curious, flexible, and far-reaching operation of reason. In one respect it is like a cunningly devised engine which admits of several adjustments, so that, though it still performs but one kind of work, it allows of a few variations in its pattern and fabric. These variations are limited in extent, and never amount to a change of the main object in view; but if accident or man's device interferes with the animal's ordinary mode of attaining that object, it will often slightly modify the operation so as to get rid of the difficulty. Though walking in a narrow path, it can still turn aside a little to the right or the left, so as to avoid an obstruction in the way. We quote from the fascinating work of Kirby and Spence a few instances of this limited flexibility of instinct.

"It is the ordinary instinct of bees to lay the foundation of their combs at the top of the hive, building them perpendicularly downwards; and they pursue this plan so constantly, that you might examine a thousand (probably ten thousand) hives, without finding any material deviation from it. Yet Huber in the course of his experiments forced them to build their combs perpendicu larly upward; and what seems even more remarkable, in an horizontal direction.

"The combs of bees are always at an uniform distance from each other, namely, about one third of an inch, which is just wide enough to allow them to pass easily and have access to the young brood. On the approach of winter, when their honeycells are not sufficient in number to contain all the stock, they elongate them considerably, and thus increase their capacity. By this extension the intervals between the combs are unavoidably contracted; but in winter well-stored magazines are essential, while from their state of comparative inactivity spacious communications are less necessary. On the return of spring, however, when the cells are wanted for the reception of eggs, the bees contract the elongated cells to their former dimensions, and thus reëstablish the just distances between the combs which the care of their brood requires. But this is not all. Not only do they elongate the cells of the old combs when there is an extraordinary harvest of honey, but they actually give to the new cells which they construct on this emergency a much greater diameter as well as a greater depth.

"The queen-bee in ordinary circumstances places each egg in the centre of the pyramidal bottom of the cell, where it remains fixed by its natural gluten; but in an experiment of Huber, one whose fecundation had been retarded had the first segments of her abdomen so swelled that she was unable to reach the bottom of the cells. She therefore attached her eggs (which were those of males) to their lower side, two lines from the mouth. As the larvæ always pass that state in the place where they are deposited, those hatched from the eggs in question remained in the situation assigned them. But the working-bees, as if aware that in these circumstances the cells would be too short to contain the larvæ when fully grown, added to their length, even before the eggs were hatched.

"Bees close up the cells of the grubs, previously to their transformation, with a cover or lid of wax; and in hanging its abode with a silken tapestry before it assumes the pupa state, the grub requires that the cell should not be too short for its movements. Bonnet having placed a swarm in a very flat glass hive, the bees constructed one of the combs parallel to one of the principal sides,

where it was so straight that they could not give to the cells their ordinary depth. The queen, however, laid eggs in them, and the workers daily nourished the grubs, and closed the cells at the period of transformation. A few days afterwards he was surprised to perceive in the lids holes more or less large, out of which the grubs partly projected, the cells having been too short to admit of their usual movements. He was curious to know how the bees would proceed. He expected that they would pull all the grubs out of the cells, as they commonly do when great disorders in the combs take place. But he did not sufficiently give credit to the resources of their instinct. They did not displace a single grub -they left them in their cells; but as they saw that these cells were not deep enough, they closed them afresh with lids much more convex than ordinary, so as to give to them a sufficient depth; and from that time no more holes were made in the lids.

"The working-bees, in closing up the cells containing larvæ, invariably give a convex lid to the large cells of drones, and one nearly flat to the smaller cells of workers; but in an experiment instituted by Huber to ascertain the influence of the size of the cells on that of the included larvæ, he transferred the larvæ of workers to the cells of drones. What was the result? Did the bees still continue blindly to exercise their ordinary instinct? On the contrary, they now placed a nearly flat lid upon these large cells, as if well aware of their being occupied by a different race of inhabitants.

"On some occasions, bees, in consequence of Huber's arrangements in the interior of their habitations, have begun to build a comb nearer to the adjoining one than the usual interval; but they soon appeared to perceive their error, and corrected it by giving to the comb a gradual curvature, so as to resume the ordinary distance.

"In another instance, in which various irregularities had taken place in the form of the combs, the bees, in prolonging one of them, had, contrary to their usual custom, begun two separate and distant continuations, which in approaching instead of joining would have interfered with each other, had not the bees, apparently foreseeing the difficulty, gradually bent their edges so as to make them join with such exactness that they could afterwards continue them conjointly."- pp. 576, 577.

We observe in all these instances, that neither the ruling purpose, which is the preservation and nourishment of their young, nor the general form and character of the cradle-cell, is ever changed. The bees can modify their work just enough to avoid what may be termed the ordinary casualties