Note 156 — Chapter IV
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Galen remarks upon the immediate activity of animal instinct prior to example or habituation. Most Naturalists know his experiment of hatching three different sorts of eggs together. He was much struck to see the young aquatic bird, reptile, and eaglet, betake themselves at once, each to his vocation. Some persons referred these instincts to the influence of organs fitted for definite uses, yet, observes Galen, the young calf will butt before he has got horns. A good deal might be added to Galen's rejoinder. Animals seem often to work without fitness of organization,—or one might almost say in defiance of their organs. "There is nothing," says Sir C. Bell, "in the configuration of the black bear, particularly adapted for his catching fish; yet he will sit, on his hinder extremities, by the side of a stream, morning or evening, on the watch, like a practised fisher, and so perfectly motionless as to deceive the eye of the Indian, who mistakes him for the burnt trunk of a tree; when he sees his opportunity favourable, he will thrust out his fore-paw, and seize a fish with incredible celerity. The exterior organ is not, in this instance, the cause of the habit or of the propensity; and if we thus see the instinct bestowed without the appropriate organ, may we not the more readily believe, in other examples, when the two are conjoined, that the habit exists with the instrument, although not through it?" (Bridgewater Treatise, Chap. x. p. 250.)—In Captain Cook's third voyage there is another anecdote of bears equally curious. "The wild deer (barein) are far too swift for those lumbering sportsmen; so the bear perceives them at a distance by the scent; and, as they herd in low grounds, when he approaches them, he gets upon the adjoining eminence, from whence he rolls down pieces of rock; nor does he quit his ambush, and pursue, until he finds that some have been maimed." (Vol. 3, p. 306.)
In such cases as these, there is a manifest want of correspondence between animal organisms and animal instincts, which many naturalists consider essentially interdependent. Yet on their mutual action and reaction some have founded a theory of evolution.