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“ cases where a structure or an instinct is of primary
benefit to its possessor and then becomes of secondary
benefit to some other species, on account of the latter
being able in some way or other to utilise its action.”*
The second of these statements considerably qualifies the
first. And it can be shown to be true in many instances
not only that a dominant race uses another for its own
purposes, but that the co-operation is voluntary on both
sides, and that great benefits are gained by its adoption.
This co-operation conferring advantage to both species
seems to me exactly to answer Mr. Romanes’ requirements.
“ Mow magnificent a display of divine beneficence would
organic nature have afforded if all—or even some—species
had been so interrelated as to have ministered to each
other’s wants ! ” But if this be so, all the demands which
can fairly be made on behalf of the theory of beneficent
design are amply satisfied by the co-operation which
actually exists.
Mr. Romanes quotes the concluding sentence from the
article on “ Instinct,” contained in the 8th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which runs thus:—
“ It thus only remains for us to regard instinct as a mental faculty,
sui generis, the gift of God to the lower animals, that man, in his
own person, and by them, might be relieved from the meanest
drudgery of nature.”
In the course of his comments on this passage, Mr. Romanes
says:—
“This example will serve to show not only the distance that we
have travelled in our interpretation of organic nature between the two
successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but also the
amount of verification which this fact furnishes to the theory of
Natural Selection. For, inasmuch as it belongs to the very essence
of this theory, that all adaptive characters (whether instinctive or
structural) must have reference to their own possessors, we find over-
p. 288.