I see I must have unconsciously taken my first chapter from this passage, but it is immaterial. I owe Mr. Darwin much more than this. I owe it to him that I believe in evolution at all. I owe him for almost all the facts which have led me to differ from him, and which I feel absolutely safe in taking for granted, if he has advanced them. Nevertheless, I believe that the conclusion arrived at in the passage which I will next quote is a mistaken one, and that not a little only, but fundamentally. I shall therefore venture to dispute it. The passage runs:— “If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited—and it can be shown that this does sometimes happen—then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished. . . . _But it would be a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation_, _and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations_. _It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted—namely_, _those of the hive-bee and of many ants_, _could not possibly have been acquired by habit_.” (“Origin of Species,” p. 206, ed. 1876.) The italics in this passage are mine. No difficulty is opposed to my view (as I call it, for the sake of brevity) by such an instinct as that of ants to milk aphids. Such instincts may be supposed to have been acquired in much the same way as the instinct of a farmer to keep a cow. Accidental discovery of the fact that the excretion was good, with “a little dose of judgement or reason” from time to time appearing in an exceptionally clever ant, and by him communicated to his fellows, till the habit was so confirmed as to be capable of transmission in full unself-consciousness (if indeed the instinct be unself-conscious in this case), would, I think, explain this as readily as the slow and gradual accumulations of instincts which had never passed through the intelligent and self-conscious stage, but had always prompted action without any idea of a why or a wherefore on the part of the creature itself.