Page - 270 - in The Origin of Species

270 ORIGIN OF SPECIES our chickens has become useless under domestication, for the mother-hen has almost lost by disuse the power of flight. Hence, we may conclude, that under domestication instincts have been acquired, and natural instincts have been lost, partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating, during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and ac- tions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident. In some cases compulsory habit alone has sufficed to produce inherited mental changes; in other cases, compulsory habit has done nothing, and all has been the result of selection, pursued both methodically and unconsciously: but in most cases habit and selection have probably concurred. SPECIAL INSTINCTS We shall, perhaps, best understand how instincts in a state of nature have become modified by selection, by considering a few cases. I will select only three,—namely, the instinct which leads the cuckoo to lay her eggs in other birds' nests; the slave-making instinct of certain ants ; and the cell-making power of the hive-bee. These two latter instincts have gener- ally and justly been ranked by naturalists as the most won- derful of all known instincts. Instincts of the Cuckoo.—It is supposed by some naturalists that the more immediate cause of the instinct of the cuckoo is, that she lays her eggs, not daily, but at intervals of two or three days; so that, if she were to make her own nest and sit on her own eggs, those first laid would have to be left for some time unincubated, or there would be eggs and young birds of different ages in the same nest. If this were the case, the process of laying and hatching might be inconveni- ently long, more especially as she migrates at a very early period; and the first hatched young would probably have to be fed by the male alone. But the American cuckoo is in this predicament; for she makes her own nest, and has eggs and young successively hatched, all at the same time. 'It has been both asserted and denied that the American cuckoo occasion- ally lays her eggs in other birds' nests ; but I have lately heard from Dr. Merrell, of Iowa, that he once found in Illinois a young cuckoo together with a young jay in the nest of a Blue