VI. When, however, an impression has once reached transmission point—whether it be of the nature of a sudden striking thought, which makes its mark deeply then and there, or whether it be the result of smaller impressions repeated until the nail, so to speak, has been driven home—we should expect that it should be remembered by the offspring as something which he has done all his life, and which he has therefore no longer any occasion to learn; he will act, therefore, as people say, _instinctively_. No matter how complex and difficult the process, if the parents have done it sufficiently often (that is to say, for a sufficient number of generations), the offspring will remember the fact when association wakens the memory; it will need no instruction, and—unless when it has been taught to look for it during many generations—will expect none. This may be seen in the case of the humming-bird sphinx moth, which, as Mr. Darwin writes, “shortly after its emergence from the cocoon, as shown by the bloom on its unruffled scales, may be seen poised stationary in the air with its long hair-like proboscis uncurled, and inserted into the minute orifices of flowers; _and no one I believe has ever seen_ this moth learning to perform its difficult task, which requires such unerring aim” (“Expression of the Emotions,” p. 30). And, indeed, when we consider that after a time the most complex and difficult actions come to be performed by man without the least effort or consciousness—that offspring cannot be considered as anything but a continuation of the parent life, whose past habits and experiences it epitomises when they have been sufficiently often repeated to produce a lasting impression—that consciousness of memory vanishes on the memory’s becoming intense, as completely as the consciousness of complex and difficult movements vanishes as soon as they have been sufficiently practised—and finally, that the real presence of memory is testified rather by performance of the repeated action on recurrence of like surroundings, than by consciousness of recollecting on the part of the individual—so that not only should there be no reasonable bar to our attributing the whole range of the more complex instinctive actions, from first to last, to memory pure and simple, no matter how marvellous they may be, but rather that there is so much to compel us to do so, that we find it difficult to conceive how any other view can have been ever taken—when, I say, we consider all these facts, we should rather feel surprise that the hawk and sparrow still teach their offspring to fly, than that the humming-bird sphinx moth should need no teacher. The phenomena, then, which we observe are exactly those which we should expect to find.