Reverting, however, to the stage where the general instinctive follow-my-leader tendency is only partly or incompletely specialized along particular lines of behaviour, we should have at this stage certain hereditary trends of action, dependent on stimuli afforded by the behaviour of others, but needing, for their guidance to finer issues and more adequate and highly perfected performance, the play of intelligence and the satisfaction of nascent social impulses. In the economy of the hive or the nest there are, no doubt, instinctive tendencies and predispositions; but there is also something more than organic heredity with its transmitted modes of behaviour analogous to the inherited form and structure of the body or its parts. Consciousness exerts a guiding influence. The insect is not independent of experience, but is capable of profiting by the teachings of that fertile mother of all intelligent behaviour. It is unnecessary, however, to insist on the fact that such insects are something more than instinctive automata, but are guided in their behaviour by the results of experience. Many careful observers lay stress upon this; if, indeed, they do not go further and claim for the social insect the higher rational faculty. “When we see,” says Lord Avebury,[105] “an ant-hill tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding the young, tending their domestic animals--each one fulfilling its duties industriously, and without confusion--it is difficult altogether to deny to them the gift of reason; and the preceding observations tend to confirm the opinion that their mental powers differ from those of man, not so much in kind as in degree.” If the term “reason” be here accepted in the broad sense, and not in the narrower sense before indicated, this passage will probably be endorsed by the majority of those who have paid any attention to the subject. Even those who regard “reason,” in the more restricted acceptation of the term, as outside any scheme of evolution, since it differs in kind and not merely in degree, would probably deny this faculty to ants. In any case the passage expresses the conviction of a close and singularly unprejudiced observer, that the doings of ants involve conscious guidance in the light of experience individually acquired. And yet the behaviour of different species of ants, each after its kind, is remarkably constant--so constant that, to use the words of Dr. Peckham in another connection, it is characteristic of the species, and would be an important part of any definition of the insect based upon its habits. And some part of this constancy may be due to tradition, though much of it may result from strong instinctive tendencies which intelligence guides to similar ends, because the conditions are similar in successive generations of social insects.