Thus the problem solved by the bee and declared till a recent period never to have been satisfactorily expounded, has at length received an adequate solution from man. Aristomachus of Soli devoted fifty-eight years to the study of the frugal bee. Philiscus the Thracian spent a life in the forest that he might acquire a knowledge of its mysterious ways. Huber, Réaumur, Hunter, and Swammerdam failed to discover the secret. To the genius of Charles Darwin we owe the solution of a problem which baffled the sages of old and perplexed the naturalists and mathematicians of our modern world. The honeycomb is no longer "a miracle which overwhelms our faculties." The cell-making instinct of the bee can never again be pronounced an assured product of Divine Wisdom, nor the winged architect of the hive be admired as a living embodiment of creative art, an unimpeachable witness to the coercive force of the vaunted argument from Design. F CHAPTER IX. SPECIAL ADAPTATION-THE BIRD. THERE are many other special instincts in the animal world which it would be interesting to examine, though, if the case of the bee as a witness to the truth of the doctrine of Design be found inconclusive, less impressive instances are little likely to convince the incredulous mind. We will briefly, however, examine the evidence which many have detected in the instinctive operations of the bird; and above all, in the remarkable developments of the nest-building instinct. That the architectural ingenuity of the bird, which succeeds in its first experiment, it is said, as well as in subsequent trials of its skill, arises from a constitutional proclivity, urging it to build on a particular model, to select a suitable situation, to choose appropriate materials, is by no means denied. But we are not obliged to refer this acknowledged proclivity to an Omnipotent Creator when we can explain it on the principle of hereditary transmission. A traditional knowledge of objects and relations suffices to interpret this mysterious instinct. The process originally performed, without conscious understanding of the relations between the means and the ends, by the untutored individuals of a species, may be repeated by their descendants when the requisite number of experiences has developed the aptitude and prepared it for the use of a privileged posterity. If an instinct like that of the bird were the production of Omnipotent Wisdom, we should naturally expect it to be complete, unerring, invariable. We should scarcely be prepared to find that it required the supplementary aid of ordinary intelligence to compensate for its deficiencies. This, however, is the case; for, as Dr. Carpenter points out,1 the bird profits by experience, and learns to adapt means to ends when occasion demands. Or can we suppose that the jackdaws were endowed with a supernatural instinct who placed their nest in a window on a spiral staircase in a church-tower, and when, under the weight of a few sticks, the nest slipped down the inclined sill, pertinaciously renewed their futile efforts? Shall we not, on the other hand, justly infer that when at last they surmounted their difficulty by piling up a cone of sticks to a level with the window-sill, so as to secure the support they needed for their nest, the clever birds profited by their experience, and by adopting "a device quite foreign" to their habits, thus furnished us with convincing evidence of their own natural sagacity? Or take again, from Dr. Carpenter, the instance of the wren that built her nest in a dangerous quarry, and found her proceedings disturbed by the explosions carried on there. What supernatural instinct can we reasonably attribute to her as 1 Principles of Mental Physiology, by William B. Carpenter, M.D., &c., pp. 86-87. long as she continued to build on this perilous site; or how can we avoid accrediting her with ability to profit by experience when she learned to associate the sound of the warning bell with the coming explosion, and even refused to obey the suspected sign when the men rung it for the amusement of visitors, prudently waiting till they began to move themselves? A third illustration is supplied by the sparrow. This bird, which, Mr. Romanes tells us,1 inherits from its ancestors the tradition of building dome-shaped nests on trees, quarters itself on the houses of men, where substitutes for such nests are found ready-made, and thus, by a simple use of its own natural intelligence, saves itself the trouble of building on a supposed supernatural type. In this instance it will be noted, that on the Design hypothesis the supposed God-given instinct for building the dome-shaped nest is actually superseded by the common-sense of the bird under the teaching of experience. .. Dr. Carpenter, as we have seen, ascribes the nestbuilding genius of these birds to a hereditarily developed aptitude. Similarly, following Mr. Darwin, "we can understand, on the principle of inheritance, how it is that the thrush of Tropical South America lines its nest with mud, in the same peculiar manner as does our British thrush;" how it is that "the male wrens of North America build cock-nests to roost on, like the males of our kitty-wren-a habit wholly unlike 1 Report of Lecture in Daily News by Mr. G. J. Romanes, on the Darwinian Theory of Instinct. that of any other known bird;" or how the swift, secreting more and more saliva, should at last produce a species with instincts leading it to neglect other materials," and to make its nest exclusively of that agglutinating substance.1 Other instincts there are in birds, and not in birds only, which admit of a like explanation; and surely we must find it far more satisfactory to regard, with Mr. Darwin, such instincts as that of "the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, the larvæ of ichneumonidæ feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars," not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings—namely, multiply, vary; let the strongest live and the weakest die." 1 The Origin of Species, pp. 228-234. |