But no one could describe one species of the brute world as
having derived a similar lesson from another, and much less from trees
and plants. No species of animals has learnt anything new even from
man, except within the narrow sphere of domestication.
It is only in particulars that instinct appears superior to reason in
the works it achieves. When an animal is taken, ever so little, out of
the ordinary circumstances in which its instincts act, it is apt to
behave very foolishly. If a woodpecker's egg is hatched by a bird which
builds an open nest upon the branches of a tree, when the young bird is
grown large enough to shuffle about in the nest, induced by its
instinct to suppose that its nest is in a hole walled round on all
sides by the tree, with a long, narrow entrance down from above, it
does not see that it has been inducted into the open nest of another
bird, and is sure to tumble out. The bee and the ant, in a few
particulars, show wonderful sagacity; but remove them from the narrow
compass of their instincts, and all their wisdom is at an end. That
animals are so wise in a few things and so wanting in wisdom in all
others shows that they are endowed with a mental principle essentially
of a different nature from that of the human race.
Pages:
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26