o superficial facts concerning
memory which we can all of us test for ourselves--I mean its dormancy
until kindled by the return of a sufficient number of associated ideas,
and its unselfconsciousness upon becoming intense and perfect--and had
he connected these two facts with the unity of life through successive
generations--an idea which plainly haunted him--he would have been
saved from having to refer instinct to imitation, in the face of the
fact that in a thousand instances the creature imitating can never have
seen its model, save when it was a part of its parents,--seeing what
they saw, doing what they did, feeling as they felt, and remembering
what they remembered.

Miss Seward tells us that Dr. Darwin read his chapter on instinct "to a
lady who was in the habit of rearing canary birds. She observed that the
pair which he then saw building their nest in her cage, were a male and
female, who had been hatched and reared in that very _cage_, and were
not in existence when the mossy cradle was fabricated in which _they_
first saw light." She asked him, and quite reasonably, "how, upon his
principle of imitation, he could account for the nest he then saw
building, being constructed even to the precise disposal of every hair
and shred of wool upon the model of _that_ in which the pair were born,
and on which every other canary bird's nest is constructed, when the
proper materials are furnished. That of the pyefinch," she added, "is of
much compacter form, warmer, and more comfortable. Pull one of these
nests to pieces for its materials; and place another nest before these
canary birds as a pattern, and see if they will make the slightest
attempt to imitate their model! No, the result of their labour will,
upon instinctive hereditary impulse, be exactly the slovenly little
mansion of their race, the same with that which their parents built
before themselves were hatched. The Doctor could not do away the force
of that single fact, with which his system was incompatible, yet he
maintained that system with philosophic sturdiness, though experience
brought confutation from a thousand sources."[157]

As commonly happens in such disputes, both were right and both were
wrong. The lady was right in refusing to refer instinct to imitation,
and the Doctor was right in maintaining reason and instinct to be but
different degrees of perfection of the same mental processes. Had he
substituted "memory" for "imitation," and asked th