, 1888-03-15
INSTINCTS THAT ARE LOST.
Or Is Man Really Heir of All tho Eacul-
tics of the Animal Kingdom?

Ii the doctrine De true tnaS man Is real
ly the heir of all the various species and
genera of the animal kingdom, it seems
a little hard upon us that, even by way of
exception, we inherit none of the most
marvellous instincts of those species and
genera, and have TO be content with
those greater but purely human faculties
by which even the most wonderful of the
animal instincts nave been somehow ex-
tinguished. Sir John Lubbock maintains
with a good deal of plausibility that there
are insects, and very likely even higher
animals, which perceive colors of which
we nave no glimpse, and hear sounds
which to us are inaudible. Yet we never
hear of a human retina that includes in
its vision those colors depending on vibra-
tons of the ether which are too slow or
too rapid for our ordinary eyes, nor of a
human ear which is entranced with mu-
sic that to the great majority of our
species is absolutely inaudible. Again,
we never hear of a human being who
could perform the feat of which we were
told only the other day in a bloodhound.
In a dark night it followed up for three
miles the trail of a thief with whom the
bloodhound could never have beer in
contact Che had just purloined some rolls
of tan from the lanyard in which the dog
was chained up), and finally sat down
under the tree in which the man had
taken refuge.
Why, we wonder, are those finer pow
ers of discriminating and following the
track of a scent which so many of tho
lower animals possess, entirely extin-
guished in man, if man be the real heir
of all the various genera which show
powers inferior to his own? We see no
trace in animals of that high enjoyment
of the finer scents which make the bios
soming of the spring flowers SO great a
delight to human beings, and yet men
are entirely destitute of that almost I'M
erring power of tracking the path of an
odor which seems to be one of the princi-
pal gifts of many ~quadrupeds and some
birds. 1t is the same with the power of
/ a dog or cat to find its way bach to a
home to which it is attached, but from
which it has been taken by a route that it
cannot possibly follow on its return, even
if it had the power of Observing that
route, which usually it has not had.
Nothing could be more convenient than
such a power to a lost child. But no one
ever heard of any child who possessed it.
Still more enviable is that instinct pos
sessed by so many birds of crossing great
tracts of land n sea without apparently
any or scenarios to guide
them, and of reaching a quarter of the
globe which many of them have never
visited before, while those who have
visited it before nave not visited it often
enough to learn the way-at least, by any
rule which, in like circumstances, would
be of any use to human intelligence. The
migratory birds must certainly b. in pos
QpGGipn of aithor argn 49, ,,,.,-o. -
tirely beyond the range of human imag-
nation, and yet no one ever heard of the
survival of such a sense or instinct in any
member of our race. 1t may be said, in
deed, that men nave either inherited or
reproduced the slave making instinct of
some of the military ants, though that
unfortunate and degrading instinct does
not appear to have been inherited by any
of her higher animals which intervene
between the insects and our own race:
but this only enhances the irony of our
destiny, if we do, indeed, in any sense
inherit from these insect a~ristocracies one
OF the most disastrous instincts of the
audacious but indolent creatures which
hight 30 much better than they work. If
we have not inherited the architectural
instincts of bees Or beavers, nor the spin-
nlng instincts of spiders, nor the power
OF thed dog TO track out its home, it is q
little sad hat we should have inherited
the one disastrous instinct of the ant by
which it makes itself dependent on a more
timid and industrious species of its own
race, and thereby loses the power to help
itself.
= What is still more curious is that even
where human beings have wholly excep-
tional and unheard of powers they betray
no traces of the exceptional and unheard
of powers of the races whose vital organi-
cation we are said to inherit. The
occasional appearance of very rare math-
ematical powers, for instance, so far
from being in any sense e~xplicable from
below, looks much more like inspiration
from above. The calculating boy who
could not even give any account of the
process whereby he arrived at correct
results which the educated mathematician
took some time to verify, certainly was
not reviving in himself any of the rare
powers of the lower tribes of animals.
Nor do the prodigies in music who show
such marvellous power in infancy recall
to us any instinct of the bird, the only
musical creature except ourselves. Still
less, of course, does great moral genius,
the genius of a Howard or a Clarkson,
suggests any "reminiscences of what hap
pens in the world of animal life
Spectator.