WE have hitherto considered animals with especial regard to the variation and re-adaptation of morphological characters, e.g. modifications of form and colour; and we have now to ask whether their behaviour also is to be referred as to its origin, in whole or in part, to the principle of selection. All around us we can see that animals know how to use their parts or organs in a purposeful manner: the duckling swims at once upon the water; the chicken which has just been hatched from the egg pecks at the seeds lying on the ground; the butterfly but newly emerged from the pupa, as soon as its wings have dried and hardened, knows how to use them in flight; and the predatory wasp requires no instruction to recognize her victim, a particular caterpillar, a grasshopper, or some other definite insect; she knows how to attack it, to paralyse it by stings, and then hesitates not a moment as to what she has to do next; she drags it to her nest, deposits it in one of the cells already prepared for her future brood, lays a single egg upon it, and roofs the cell carefully over. It is only because all these complex acts are so precisely performed, as precisely as if the wasp knew why she performed them, that the species is able to maintain its existence, for only thus can the rearing of the next generation be secured. Out of the egg there slips a little larva, which at once makes for the paralysed victim, feeds upon it, and grows thereby, then, within the shelter of the closed cell, passes through the pupa stage and is transformed into a perfect wasp. Many species of these predatory wasps do not lay the egg directly beside or upon their prey, but lest its movements should endanger their offspring, they hang the egg above it by a silken thread. It is thus in security, and the young larva, too, when it appears, can withdraw to its safely swinging resting-place as soon as danger threatens from the convulsive struggles of the unfortunate victim at whose body it is gnawing. Every animal has a great many such 'instincts,' which lead it, indeed force it, to act appropriately towards an end, without having any consciousness of that end. For how should the butterfly know what flying is, or that it possessed the power of flight at all, or who could have shown the predatory wasp, when she wakened from the pupa sleep to quite a new kind of life, all that she had to do in order to procure food for herself and to secure shelter and nourishment for the brood which was still enclosed within her ovary? Since species have developed from other species, these regulators of the body, the instincts, cannot have been the same in earlier times; they must have evolved out of the instincts of ancestors, and the questions we have to ask are: By what factors? In what way? Has the principle of selection been operative here too, or can we refer instincts to the inherited effects of use and disuse?