are covered by houses from the inclemency of the weather, lay their eggs at any season; which evinces that the spring of the year is not pointed out to them, says Dr. Darwin, by a necessary instinct. Now I confess, to me, this fact points precisely to an opposite inference. What is the instinct? To hatch their young at a season of the year when the weather is mild, and when food is plenty. Nature knows nothing about the Golden Letter; she never looks into the almanac, and is quite ignorant when Easter falls; but she prompts the bird to hatch her young, by those different feelings of body, which copious food, and genial warmth, produce. They are the feelings which precede the instinctive action and if you make perpetual spring to the animal all the year round, similar feelings produce similar instincts; and, instead of refuting the supposition that the animal is under the influence of instinct, powerfully confirm it. Dr. Darwin's mistake proceeds from this: he supposes Nature intended birds to hatch in April or May; whereas, Nature intended they should hatch when they are warm, and well fed; which, in a state of nature, they are in those months; but which, when protected by man, in order that they may be eaten, they are at all times. It would be just as rational to say, that Nature did not intend the production of green peas to depend upon the humid warmth of the spring, because the humid warmth of the spring is counterfeited in hot-houses, and a dish of peas is produced in December, to the astonishment of ordinary understandings, and to the endless glory of the lady at whose table they are displayed.

In the same manner the rabbit digs a burrow in his wild state. In his tame state, he spares himself that trouble. But to this, which delights Dr. Darwin so very highly, I have two answers: a tame rabbit, in all probability, does not burrow in the earth, because he is shut up in a deal box, and kept in a garret; and if he refuse to burrow, though turned out, the explanation of this change in his instincts is accounted for precisely upon the same principles as the last. Nature does not at once put the animal upon making a burrow; but it impels it to do that thing by some previous feeling of body or mind,

by hunger, by cold, by fear, or by the change of feelings in the body, when about to produce its young. You change the feelings which by the law of nature precede the action, and then the action is not performed. You may very likely discover some moral affection, or some change in the body, which precedes all instinctive motions; but the difficulty is still as great as it was before. Why does cold make the rabbit dig a burrow? Why does warmth induce the bird to build a nest after that ancient model of nests which it has never seen? Such things do not occur in our species. We must, therefore, find for them some other appellation than that of reason, by which all our actions are swayed.

The most curious instance of a change of instinct is mentioned by Darwin. The bees carried over to Barbadoes and the Western Isles, ceased to lay up any honey after the first year; as they found it not useful to them. They found the weather so fine and materials for making honey so plentiful, that they quitted their grave, prudent, and mercantile character, became exceedingly profligate and debauched, eat up their capital, resolved to work no more, and amused themselves by flying about the sugar-houses, and stinging the blacks. The fact is, that by putting animals in different situations, you may change, and even reverse, any of their original propensities. Spallanzani brought up an eagle upon bread and milk, and fed a dove on raw beef. The circumstances by which an animal is surrounded, impel him to do so and so, by the changes they produce in his body and mind. Alter those circumstances, and he no longer does as he did before. This, instead of disproving the existence of an instinct, only points out the causes on which it depends. Many actions of animals have been mistaken for instinctive, which are not so; or, rather, the object for which they act has been mistaken. It is supposed that ants lay up their magazines against the winter: "but ants," says Buffon, "are torpid in the winter, and don't eat at all; therefore, what is the use of their magazines?" Why, this is the use of their magazines; that there come often enough, before the season of their torpor, three or four rainy days, when they can

not venture out to get any food, and then their magazine is of importance. Besides, the Count should have told us whether they do not revive again before the provisions on which they subsist; if they do, there is another reason why they should have a stock in hand. Neither does it disprove the existence of instinct, because the instinct is sometimes not so fine and so minute as might have been expected, or was supposed. "The provisions of the ant, of the field-mouse, and of the bee," says Buffon, "are discovered to be only useless and disproportioned masses, collected without any view to futurity; and the minute and particular laws of their pretended foresight are reduced to the general and real law of feeling."All that this objection amounts to is, that Nature has not impelled these animals to collect a certain quantity avoirdupois; that they are taught to collect, and that the impulse only operates within gross limits, but still with sufficient precision for the preservation of the animal. So the instinct of a bird to sit upon eggs exists, though it is given very grossly, for it will sit upon a chalk-stone like an egg. The instinct is to foster, with the heat of its body, that which it produces. In the absence of the bird, you put in that which resembles its production; the bird has no other mode of judging, but by the eye,-the eye is deceived. This only proves that the instinct is gross, not that it does not exist. But while I am talking about the instincts of ducks and rabbits, a certain instinct, very valuable in a professor, admonishes me that I am tiring my audience, and that it is time to put an end to my lecture. The enemies of moral philosophy may, perhaps, say this feeling is experience, and not instinct; however, be it what it may, I shall obey it, and conclude the subject at our next meeting.

LECTURE XVIII.

ON THE FACULTIES OF BEASTS.

BEFORE I proceed upon the body of this lecture, I wish to state, by anticipation, the doctrines it will contain; and this I shall do very shortly, reserving the proof for its proper place. Animals are not mere machines, like clocks and watches. It is a very dangerous doctrine to assert, that so much apparent choice and deliberation can exist in mere matter. If they are not merely material (like machines of human invention), they must be a composition of mind and matter. There are observable in the minds of brutes, faint traces and rudiments of the human faculties. This position has been maintained by Reid, Locke, Hartley, Stewart, and all the best writers on these subjects. If man were a solitary animal, like a lion or a bear, he would not be so superior to all animals as he is. If he had the hoof of oxen instead of hands, he would not be so superior: neither would he, if he had less perfect organs of speech; nor if his life were confined to a very few years, instead of being extended to seventy. But all these things will not do by any means alone, as the degraders of human nature have said; for there are some animals, which very nearly possess all these advantages, and yet are perfectly contemptible, when compared even to the lowest of men. But the great source of man's superiority is, the immense and immeasurable disproportion of those faculties, of which Nature has given the mere rudiments to brutes; that this disproportion has made man a speculative animal, even where his mere existence is not concerned; that it has made him a progressive animal; that it has made him a religious animal; and that upon that mere

superiority, and on the very principle that the chain of mind and spirit terminates here with man, the best and the most irrefragable arguments for the immortality of the soul are founded, which natural religion can afford: that, independent of revelation, it would be impossible not to perceive that man is the object of the creation, and that he, and he alone, is reserved for another and a better state of existence. These are my principles, in which if any man here present differ from me, I trust at least he will have the kindness and the politeness to hear me.

There is another circumstance, very decisive of the nature of instinct, and which goes strongly to show it is something very different from reason. I mean the uniformity of actions in animals. The bees now build exactly as they built in the time of Homer; the bear is as ignorant of good manners as he was two thousand years past; and the baboon is still as unable to read and write, as persons of honor and quality were in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Of the improvements made by the insect tribe, we can not speak with much certainty; and the advocates for the perfectibility of animals, tell us, it is impossible that ants' nests may be laid out with much greater regularity than they used to be, and that experience may have taught them many methods of draining off water, and preventing the growth of ears of barley. It certainly may, but we have no sort of proof that it does; and the analogy of all large animals, whose economy we are perfectly acquainted with, and can easily observe, is against the supposition. Neither is it from any lack of inconveniences, nor any extraordinary contentedness with their situ ation, that any species of animals remains in such a state of sameness. The wolf often kills twenty times as much as he wants; and if he could hit upon any means of preserving his superfluous plunder, he would not perish of hunger so often as he does. To lay traps for the hunters, and to eat them as they were caught, would be far preferable to all those animals who are the cause, and the contents, of traps themselves. Animals, like men, are goaded by wants and sufferings; but, contrary