purpose is to indicate, not to criticize, Eimer’s position. He claims that “the original progenitors of the cuckoo, when they began to lay their eggs in other nests, acted by reflection and design.” Of the behaviour of mason wasps and their allies, which provide their young with paralyzed but living prey, he exclaims, “What a wonderful contrivance! What calculation on the part of the animal must have been necessary to discover it!” Of the instincts of neuter bees he remarks, “Selection cannot here have had much influence, since the workers do not reproduce. In order to make these favourable conditions constant, insight and reflection on the part of the animals, and the inheritance of these faculties were necessary.” And he concludes, “Thus, according to the preceding considerations, automatic action may be described as habitual voluntary action; instinct, as inherited habitual voluntary action, or the capacity for such action.” Turning now to the opposite end of the scale of opinion, we find that Professor Weismann, commenting on the supposed inheritance of acquired habit, says,[44] “I believe that this is an entirely erroneous view, and I hold that all instinct is entirely due to the operation of natural selection, and has its foundation, not upon inherited experiences, but upon variation of the germ.” Ziegler and Groos in Germany, Whitman and Baldwin in America, Poulton and Wallace in England, either deny the existence of secondary instincts, due to the inheritance of acquired habits, or question the sufficiency of the evidence adduced in support of such transmission. In their explanation of the manner in which that inherited co-ordination, which is biologically the central fact in instinctive behaviour, has been evolved they rely mainly or entirely on the principle of natural selection.