writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will, nor can, without absurdity, be supposed able to do them, which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree. "-Barrow, Sermons on the Creed, Serm. VI.

10.

*

"The stone doth not deliberate whether it shall descend, nor the wheat take counsel whether or not it shall grow. Even men do not advise how their hearts shall beat, though without that pulse they cannot live. What then can be more clear than that those natural agents which work constantly, for those ends which they themselves cannot perceive, must be directed by some high and over-ruling wisdom, and who is that but the great Artificer who works in all of them? For art is so far the imitation of nature that, if it were not in the artificer but in the thing itself which by art is framed, the two were one and the same. Were that which frames a watch within it, and all those curious wheels wrought without the hand of man, it would seem to grow into that form, nor would there be any distinction between the making of that watch, and the growing of a plant. Now what the artificer is to works of art, that is the Maker of all things to all natural agents; directing all their operations to ends which they cannot apprehend; and thus appears the Maker to be the Ruler of the world, the Steerer of this great ship, the Law of this universal commonwealth, the General of all the hosts of heaven and earth. For, as 'every house is builded by some man,' and the earth bears no such creature of itself; stones do not grow into a wall, or first hew and square, then unite and fasten themselves together; trees sprout not cross like dry and sapless beams, nor spars and tiles arrange themselves into a roof; as these are the supplies of art, and testimonies to the understanding of man, the great artificer on earth, so is the world itself but a house, the habitation and the handiwork of an Infinite Intelligence, and 'He who built all things is God.'"-Pearson On the Creed, Art. I.

*

Paley's celebrated illustration was probably suggested by this passage.

C.

ON INSTINCT GENERALLY CONSIDERED.

The following remarks on Mr. Darwin's Chapter on Instinct are published here by permission of the able and eminent scholar to whom I am indebted for them :

"There is a good deal of confusion through the chapter on Instinct between instincts and habits. It strikes me that the differences between wild and domestic animals belong to the head of habits, not of instincts; i.e. such habits as may confessedly become hereditary. It is by laws identical with those of habit that man has imposed peculiarities, to suit his own purposes, on many classes of domesticated creatures: but I can see no explanation that could be given for the superiority of the hive-bee's architecture over that of the melipona which would be analogous to the influence of man's company and authority over the different habits of the domestic dog.

"But do we get any nearer to a definition of instinct if we call it congenital habit: i.e. habit which has not become hereditary by mere exception to the generally personal character of habits, but which is hereditary by its very essence and necessity? This is more like his meaning, I fancy: and this adjective congenital would enable us to divide the subject into two convenient heads: it would confine the analogy to present definition, while implying that the mode of production is not the same: the very distinction which he seems to urge.

"How then does he defend his new account of the mode in which instincts were produced, before they became hereditary and congenital? Believers say that they were impressed by God on the species which He independently created. Darwin says, that they sprang from a small dose of habit, plus a much larger dose of natural selection, and extended more to the individual than to the class. Now this cannot be proved, unless he can catch, in transitu, some indications of the process he describes. If he soars into the "great might-have-been," he must at any rate give us plenty of frontier or travelling instances to prove the correctness of the direction of his flight. This he is conscious of, and this he aims at: but not, as I think, with much success.

"In this chapter, as throughout the book, he is hampered by the absence of any present movement in the direction he requires. His

gradations are collateral, not successive: and I don't see what right he has to argue from the one to the other. Species may fade into species, by a fair arrangement, which binds the whole world in one well-ordered chain. Natural theologians have treated this proximity of type as the impress and proof of one great Creating Mind. But it is quite a different thing to admit a theory, which would simply lift up out of the mass the most rudimental extreme, and transfer it back to a remote antiquity, alleging that all the more perfect forms, which now stand side by side, in contemporary order, represent successive links in a series of progressive improvements.

"He may well be ample in his demands for time; but they are vain unless you can detect a present tendency to move. No time is long enough to turn stagnation into movement. If two species have run on strictly parallel lines ever since the date of the earliest recorded observation, no amount of time that he could postulate would make it more likely that they should converge. It is futile to promise that, if only you are allowed a sufficient length of radius, a given line shall sweep round into a circle, while the line in question will not betray, even to the most delicate instrument, the faintest approximation to a curve.

"In mankind, again, you have movement proved by history. In animals, so far as I know, (excepting what man has imposed) you have none. The horse Copenhagen and the horse Bucephalus would stand very much on the same level: but in point of general culture, there was a good deal of difference between their respective masters.

"As to his suggestions for the possible starting-points of instinct, they convey to my mind no kind of conviction. I should not care to argue the case of the pointer, because that may be, for aught I know, a mere instance of hereditary habit. It is not an uncontrolled and unaccountable instinct, like that of the cell-building bee. Nor could I argue the case of the slave-making ants, because I am not sure how far we are safe in arguing from supposed analogies between the curious proceedings of those insects, and the social vices of mankind. But as to the hive-bee, which is obviously the crucial instance, he seems really to offer no account at all. What he says with so much detail and minuteness merely amounts to this: that those economical bees, which, by a mechanical accident, happened to have made the most of their honey, came, by the law of natural selection, to supersede all less lucky bees, and ultimately to constitute the class. Add to this, that the perpetuation of the instinct is burthened by the really hope

less difficulty about the sterile workers, which makes it necessary to throw back the power of producing this improved and thrifty race, on the less gifted but parturient bees.

"When we attentively consider the habits of these articulated animals, we find that their actions, though evidently directed to the attainment of certain ends, are very far from being of the same spontaneous nature, or from possessing the same designed adaptation of means to ends, as those performed by ourselves, or by the more intelligent vertebrata, under like circumstances. We judge of this by their unvarying character, -the different individuals of the same species executing precisely the same movements, when the circumstances are the same; and by the very elaborate nature of the mental operations which would be required, in many instances, to arrive at the like results by an effort of reason. Of such we cannot have a more remarkable example than is to be found in the operations of bees, wasps, and other social insects; which construct habitations for themselves, upon a plan which the most enlightened human intelligence, working according to the most refined geometrical principles, could not surpass; but which yet do so without education communicated by their parents, or progressive attempts of their own, and with no trace of hesitation, confusion, or interruption, the different individuals of a community, all labouring effectively to one purpose, because their automatic impulses (from which their instinctive actions proceed) are all of the same nature. Although bees display the greatest art in the construction of their habitations, and execute a variety of curious contrivances, beautifully adapted to variations in their circumstances, the constancy with which individuals and communities will act alike under the same conditions appears to preclude the idea of their possessing any inherent power of spontaneously departing from the line of action, to which they are tied down by the constitution of their Nervous System. We do not find one individual or one community clever, and another stupid; nor do we ever witness a disagreement, or any appearance of indecision, as to the course of action to be pursued by the several members of any republic. The actions of all tend to one common end, simply because they are performed in respondence to impulses which all alike share.

For a bee to be destitute of its peculiar tendency

to build at certain angles would be as remarkable as for a human being to be destitute of the desire to eat when his system should require food. "Carpenter's Principles of Comparative Physiology, Sec. 651, 681, Note.

D.

ON THE GEOMETRY OF THE BEE-HIVE.

I am favoured by Professor Kelland with the following:

"If I had been asked this question-'What is the lesson from which the Bee has become so perfect a worker? Is it the experience of a saving of wax?' my answer would certainly have been that it is not. In any cells which I have seen, there appears some little slovenliness about the finishings, which strikes me as inconsistent with the supposition that the animal has at heart the necessity for economy. But I may be mistaken in this. At any rate, I cannot be mistaken in the remarkable fact that the creature works always so as to make the angles equal. The terminal prismatic faces of the comb have the remarkable property that each of the solid angles is formed of three equal angles. Now, I cannot regard this power of selecting equality of angles other than as a simple endowment direct from the Divine Mind, and the result is economy and all the benefits which we, the learners in the school of experience, find to accompany this simple instinct.

"As to Mr. Darwin's argument on this head having shaken the impression of a Divine Orderer, I cannot see how it even tends to do so. Admit, for the sake of argument, that a circle-maker rises up to a hexagon-maker, are you freed from the necessity of the framer of the power of rising?"

66

'The work of bees is among the most remarkable of all facts. The form is in every country the same-the proportions accurately alike the size the very same to the fraction of a line, go where you

L