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Show 464 DR. ST. GEORGE MIVAKT ON THE DEVELOPMENT [June 17, herself future tributes to her charms, she seeks to decorate her body with the arts of infant coquetry. Still less does she look forward to the pains and pleasures of maternity, when she begins to caress and chastise, to soothe and cherish her first doll, and fondly presses it to that region whence her future offspring will draw its nourishment. Again, when-the lapse of a few years having made her a young woman and the boy a youth-they first feel the influence of love, however ignorant they may be of the physiology of their race, they will none the less, circumstances permitting, be surely impelled towards the performance of very definite actions. In the more refined individuals of the highest races of mankind, the material element is most certainly far from being the one great end distinctly looked forward to by each pair of lovers. Yet every incident of affectionate intercourse infallibly leads on towards the one end, useful to the race, which nature has in view. Such actions fully merit to be called " instinctive." That animals even of the higher classes do perform actions which are truly instinctive is generally admitted by naturalists. Mr. Wallace, indeed, believes that Birds learn to build their nests by observing the structure of those in which they themselves are reared. I have not found this view to be shared by other naturalists of m y acquaintance; and, in spite of the deference and respect due to so eminent an observer and so lucid a reasoner as my friend Mr. Wallace, it seems to me a view which is untenable. Some of the nests which require an especial skill in their construction are those which are suspended and entirely enclosed save at one small aperture. How the young within such a nest can, by observation, learn to form it, is to me inconceivable. It is, however, the instincts of Insects which are the most wonderful, and these are so numerous and so notorious that only one or two instances at most need here be referred to, such as those of the Carpenter Bee, the Wasp Sphex, and the larval Stag-Beetle, the male of which, it is said, digs a hole, for its transformation, twice as big as his own body (to allow for the development of his enormous mandibles), while the female only digs one of her own size. Even more wonderful than the instincts of insects, are the actions of those Rhizopods which, as Dr. Carpenter affirms1, build up tests or casings of the most regular geometrical symmetry of form, and of the most artificial construction. "From the very same sandy bottom, one series picks up the coarser quartz grains, cements them together with phosphate of iron secreted from its own substance, and thus constructs a flask-shaped test having a short neck and a single large orifice. Another picks up the finest grains and puts them together with the same cement into perfectly spherical tests of the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores at regular intervals. Another selects the minutest sand-grains and the terminal portions of sponge-spicules, and works these up together -apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of the ' 'Mental Physiology,' p. 41. |