a meditation. The
one is, a comparison between reason and instinct, and the other, as to
the degree of pain inflicted upon fish by taking them with the hook.
Now it appeared to me, in the first question, what has been advanced is
by no means conclusive, and although it is the custom to offer a penny
for your thoughts, I shall give mine for nothing, which is perhaps as
much as they are worth, (I say that, to prevent others from making the
sarcastic remark), and in the second question, I think I can assist the
cause of the lovers of the _gentle_ art of angling--why _gentle_, I know
not, unless it be that anglers bait with _gentles_, and are mostly
_gentle_-men.

But before I attempt to prove that angling is not a cruel sport, I must
first get rid of "reason and instinct." Of reason most undoubtedly a
philanthropist would reply, "Be it so;" nevertheless, I will argue the
point, and if I do not succeed, I have only to hedge back upon Solomon,
and inquire, "If man was born to misery as the sparks fly upwards, why
are not the inferior classes of creation to have their share of it?"

I do not think that any one can trace out the line of demarcation
between reason and instinct. Instinct in many points in wonderful,
especially among insects, but where it is wonderful, it is a blind
obedience, and inherited from generation to generation. We observe, as
in the case of the bees, that they obey the truest laws of mathematics,
and from these laws they never have deviated from their creation, and
that all animals, as far as their self-defence or their sustenance is
concerned, show a wonderful blind obedience to an unerring power, and a
sagacity almost superior to reason. But wonderful as this is, it is
still but instinct, as the progenitors of the race were equally guided
by it, and it is handed down without any improvement, or any decay in
its power. Now if it could be asserted that the instinct of animals was
only thus inherited from race to race, and could "go no farther," the
line of demarcation between reason and instinct would at once be
manifest, as instinct would be blindly following certain fixed laws,
while reason would ever be assisted by memory and invention. But we
have not this boasted advantage on the side of reason, for animals have
both memory and invention, and, moreover, if they have not speech, they
have equal means of communicating their ideas. That this memory and
invention cannot be so much exercised as