HAL.—That instincts depend upon impulses immediately derived from the Deity is an opinion which, though it perhaps cannot be confuted, yet does not please me so much as to believe them dependent upon the formation of organs, and the result of the general laws which govern the system of the universe; and it is in favour of this opinion that they are susceptible of modifications. Thus, in domesticated animals they are always changed; the turkey and the duck lose their habits of constructing nests, and the goose does not migrate. In supposing them the result of organization and hereditary, they might be expected to be changed by circumstances, as they are actually found to be. Without referring the instincts of animals to the immediate impulse of the Deity, they appear to me to offer the most irresistible and convincing argument that can be brought forward against atheism. They demonstrate combinations, the result of the most refined intelligence, which can only be considered as infinite. Take any one of the lowest class of animals, insects for instance, not only is their organization fitted to all their wants; but their association in society is provided for, and the laws of a perfect social community, as it were, are adopted by beings, that we are sure cannot reason. In the hive bee, for instance, the instinct of the workers leads them to adopt and obey a queen; and if she is taken away from them, or dies, they have the power of raising another from offspring in the cells by an almost miraculous process: they work under her government for a common object, allow males only to exist for the purpose of impregnating females, who preserve the society, and under whose government they send forth swarms, which readily place themselves under the protection of man. In the geometrical construction of their cells, the secretion of wax from their bodies, the collecting their food, and the care of the brood, there is a series of results which it requires a strong reason to follow, and which are the consequences of invariable instincts. Bees, since they have been noticed by naturalists, have the same habits, and, as it is probable that there have been many thousand of generations since the creation, it is evident, that the instincts of the first bees have been hereditary and invariable in their offspring; and it cannot be doubted, that they do now, as they did four thousand years ago, make some cells in combs larger than others for the purpose of containing the eggs and future grubs of drones, that are to be produced by a grub, which they are educating for a queen bee; and that these cells are connected with the common cells by a series, in which the most exact geometrical laws of transition are observed. An eminent philosopher has deduced an argument in favour of the existence of Deity from the analogy of the universe to a piece of mechanism, which could only be the work of an intelligent mind; but there is this difference: in all the productions of nature,