NO. 121. THURSDAY, JULY 19.

_Jovis omnia plena_.
VIRG. Ecl. iii. v. 60.

All is full of _Jove_.


As I was walking this morning in the great yard that belongs to my
friend's country house, I was wonderfully pleased to see the different
workings of instinct in a hen followed by a brood of ducks. The young,
upon the sight of a pond, immediately ran into it, while the step-
mother, with all imaginable anxiety, hovered about the borders of it, to
call them out of an element that appeared to her so dangerous and
destructive. As the different principle which acted in these different
animals cannot be termed reason, so when we call it _instinct_, we
mean something we have no knowledge of. To me, as I hinted in my last
paper, it seems the immediate direction of providence, and such an
operation of the Supreme Being, as that which determines all the
portions of matter to their proper centres. A modern philosopher, quoted
by Monsieur _Bayle_ in his learned dissertation on the souls of
brutes, delivers the same opinion, though in a bolder form of words,
where he says, _Deus est anima brutorum_, God himself is the soul
of brutes. Who can tell what to call that seeming sagacity in animals,
which directs them to such food as is proper for them, and makes them
naturally avoid whatever is noxious or unwholesome? _Tully_ has
observed, that a lamb no sooner falls from its mother, but immediately
and of his own accord applies itself to the teat. _Dampier_, in his
travels, tells us, that when seamen are thrown upon any unknown coasts