most curious, the quantity allotted to each is exactly sufficient to
support it, till it attains the period of wasphood, and can provide for
itself. This instinct of the parent wasp is the more remarkable as it
does not feed upon flesh itself. Here the little creature has never seen
its parent; for by the time it is born, the parent is always eaten by
sparrows; and yet, without the slightest education, or previous
experience, it does everything that the parent did before it. Now the
objectors to the doctrine of instinct may say what they please, but young
tailors have no intuitive method of making pantaloons; a new-born mercer
cannot measure diaper; nature teaches a cook's daughter nothing about
sippets. All these things require with us seven years' apprenticeship;
but insects are like Moliere's persons of quality--they know everything
(as Moliere says) without having learnt anything. 'Les gens de qualite
savent tout, sans avoir rien appris.'"

How completely all difficulty vanishes from the facts so pleasantly told
in this passage when we bear in mind the true nature of personal
identity, the ordinary working of memory, and the vanishing tendency of
consciousness concerning what we know exceedingly well.

My last instance I take from M. Ribot, who writes:--"Gratiolet, in his
_Anatomie Comparee du Systems Nerveux_, states that an old piece of
wolf's skin, with the hair all worn away, when set before a little dog,
threw the animal into convulsions of fear by the slight scent attaching
to it. The dog had never seen a wolf, and we can only explain this alarm
by the hereditary transmission of certain sentiments, coupled with a
certain perception of the sense of smell." ("Heredity," p. 43.)

I should prefer to say "we can only explain the alarm by supposing that
the smell of the wolf's skin"--the sense of smell being, as we all know,
more powerful to recall the ideas that have been associated with it than
any other sense--"brought up the ideas with which it had been associated
in the dog's mind during many previous existences"--he on smelling the
wolf's skin remembering all about wolves perfectly well.

CONCLUDING REMARKS. (FROM CHAPTER XV. OF LIFE AND HABIT.)

Here, then, I leave my case, though well aware that I have crossed the
threshold only of my subject. My work is of a tentative character, put
before the public as a sketch or design for a, possibly, further
endeavour, in which I hope to derive assist