Genre:

Miscellaneous

Subjects:

Reading, Instinct, Human Species, Progress

    The fictional narrator, 'A Country Correspondent', relates some of his reflections arising from the family reading in which his circle engaged on winter's evenings. In one of these he observes: 'The inferior animals, being possessed of instinct, come to maturity at once, and remain for ever stationary, so that an ant or beaver to-day is not one degree more industrious, and more ingenious, than an ant or beaver was in Eden. The bee does not build her cell more mathematically exact in the garden of Huber, in the 19th century, than she did on the way to Timnath, two thousand years before. But it is not so with man, he profits by the accumulated knowledge of the past' (403).