Before I enter upon this question it is necessary to consider for a little the physiological basis of instinct. We can distinguish three kinds of actions: purely reflex, purely instinctive, and purely conscious actions. In the case of the first, we see most clearly that they depend on an existing mechanism, for they follow of necessity on a particular stimulus, and cannot always be suppressed. Bright light striking our eye makes the pupil narrower by a contraction of the iris, and in the same way our eyelids close if a finger be thrust suddenly towards them. We know, too, the principle of these reflex mechanisms; they depend on nerve connexions. Sensory nerves are so connected in the nerve-centres with motor nerves, that a stimulus affecting the former at the periphery of the body, as at the eye, is carried to certain nerve-cells of the brain, and from these it excites to activity certain motor centres, so that definite movements are set up. It is rarely only one muscle that is thus excited to activity, there are usually several, and here we have the transition to instinctive action, which consists in a longer or shorter series of actions, that is, of motor combinations. These, too, are originally, at least, set a-going by a sense impression, an external stimulus which affects a sensory nerve exactly in the same way as in the reflex mechanism, and this stimulus is carried to a particular group of sensory nerve-cells in the central nervous organ, and from these transmitted by very fine inter-connexions to motor centres. There are extraordinarily complex instinctive actions, and in these the completion of one action is obviously the stimulus to the second, the completion of the second to the third, and so on, until the entire chain of inter-dependent movements which make up the whole performance has been completed. Instincts have thus a material basis in the cells and fibres of the nervous system, and through variations in the connexions and irritability of these nervous parts they too can be modified, like any of the other characters of the body, such as form and colour.