“Or if a quadruped, not yet furnished with wings, were suddenly inspired with the instinct of a bird, and precipitated itself from a cliff, would not the descent be hazardously rapid?” Doubtless the animal would be no better supported than the objection.  Darwin makes very little indeed of voluntary efforts as a cause of change, and even poor Lamarck need not be caricatured.  He never supposed that an elephant would take such a notion into his wise head, or that a squirrel would begin with other than short and easy leaps; but might not the length of the leap be increased by practice?

The “North American” reviewer’s position, that the higher brute animals have comparatively little instinct and no intelligence, is a heavy blow and great discouragement to dogs, horses, elephants, and monkeys.  Stripped of their all, and left to shift for themselves as they can in this hard world, their pursuit and seeming attainment of knowledge under such peculiar difficulties is interesting to contemplate.  However, we are not so sure as is the critic that instinct regularly increases downward and decreases upward in the scale of being.  Now that the case of the bee is reduced to moderate proportions,[12] we know of nothing in instinct surpassing that of an animal so high as a bird, the Talegal, the male of which plumes himself upon making a hot-bed in which to hatch his partner’s eggs,—­which he tends and regulates the heat of about as carefully and skilfully as the unplumed biped does an eccaleobion.[13] As to the real intelligence of the higher brutes, it has been ably defended by a far more competent observer, Mr. Agassiz, to whose conclusions we yield a general assent, although we cannot quite place the best of dogs “in that respect upon a level with a considerable portion of poor humanity,” nor indulge the hope, or, indeed, the desire, of a renewed acquaintance with the whole animal kingdom in a future life.[14]

The assertion, that acquired habitudes or instincts, and acquired structures, are not heritable, any breeder or good observer can refute.

That “the human mind has become what it is out of a developed instinct"[15] is a statement which Mr. Darwin nowhere makes, and, we presume, would not accept.  As to his having us believe that individual animals acquire their instincts gradually,[16] this statement must have been penned in inadvertence both of the very definition of instinct, and of everything we know of in Mr. Darwin’s book.

It has been attempted to destroy the very foundation of Darwin’s hypothesis by denying that there are any wild varieties, to speak of, for natural selection to operate upon.  We cannot gravely sit down to prove that wild varieties abound.  We should think it just as necessary to prove that snow falls in winter.  That variation among plants cannot be largely due to hybridism, and that their variation in Nature is not essentially different from much that occurs in domestication, we could show, if our space permitted.