the song of birds, and Pope describes them as learning from the mole to
plough, from the nautilus to sail, and from bees and ants to form a
political community. Perhaps we were behind the beaver in felling
timber, in leading dams across rivers, and in building cabin
villages,--behind the wasp in making paper, and behind the squirrel and
spider in crossing streams upon rafts. So, if man had needed any
example of war and violence and wrong, he had only to go to the
ant-hill and see the red ants invade the camps of the black and bear
off their little negro prisoners into slavery.

Whatever truth there may be in these ideas, it is at least conceivable
that man may have profited from the example of these animals. He has
copied from patterns set by Nature in tree and leaf and flower and
plant; he has formed the Gothic arch and column from the trunks and
interlacing boughs of the lofty avenue, the Corinthian capital from the
acanthus foliage embracing a basket, and classic urns and vases from
flowers. But no one could describe one species of the brute world as
having derived a similar lesson from another, and much less from trees
and plants. No species of animals has learnt anything new even from
man, except within the narrow sphere of domestication.

It is only in particulars that instinct appears superior to reason in
the works it achieves. When an animal is taken, ever so little, out of
the ordinary circumstances in which its instincts act, it is apt to
behave very foolishly. If a woodpecker's egg is hatched by a bird which
builds an open nest upon the branches of a tree, when the young bird is
grown large enough to shuffle about in the nest, induced by its
instinct to suppose that its nest is in a hole walled round on all
sides by the tree, with a long, narrow entrance down from above, it
does not see that it has been inducted into the open nest of another