In the same way the instinct to seek for food wakes in the kitten at the sight of a mouse. I once set before a kitten which had never seen a mouse a living one in a trap. The kitten became greatly excited, and when I opened the trap and let the mouse run away she overtook and caught it in a few bounds. The instinct in this case does not express itself as in the chicken by the rapid lowering of the head and seizing the food, but in quite a different combination of movements, in running after and grasping the fleeing victim. But that is not all that is included in the instinctive action in the case of the cat, for there is also the whole wild and gruesome play, the familiar letting go and catching again, the passionate growling of satisfaction which, in its wildness, reminds us much more of a blood-thirsty tiger than of a tame domestic animal. As the egg-laying instinct of the female butterfly is excited only by the sight and odour of a particular plant, so also is the food instinct of the caterpillar. If we put a silkworm caterpillar (_Bombyx mori_) just out of the egg upon a mulberry leaf it will soon begin to gnaw at it; but put it on a beech leaf or on that of any other indigenous tree, shrub, or herb and it will not touch it, but simply die of hunger. And yet it could quite well eat many of these leaves, and thrive on them too, but the smell and perhaps also the sight of them is not the appropriate stimulus to liberate the instinct of eating. There are many species of caterpillar which are 'monophagous,' that is to say, restricted to a single species of plant in a country. One may ask how such a restriction of the liberating stimulus to a single species could have been brought about by natural selection, since it could not possibly be advantageous to be so much restricted in food. The answer to this will be found in the following facts. On the Belladonna plant there lives a little beetle whose feeding instinct is aroused by this plant alone. But as _Atropa belladonna_ is avoided entirely by other animals on account of its poisonousness, this beetle is, so to speak, sole proprietor of the Belladonna; no other species disputes its food, and in this there must assuredly be a great advantage, as soon as the other instincts, above all that of egg-laying, are so regulated as to secure that the larva shall have access to its food-plant; and this is the case. The monophagy of many caterpillars is to be understood in the same way; it is an adaptation to a plant otherwise little sought after, and it is combined with a more or less complete loss of sensitiveness to the stimulus of other plants. The establishment of such a specialized food-instinct depends on its utility, and has resulted from the preference given, through natural selection, to those individuals in which the food-instinct responded to the stimulus of the smallest possible number of plants, and at the same time to those