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creatures we often look like wretched copyists of animals, far beneath us in the scale of organisation, and we seem to confess as much by the names which we give them. The mason-wasp, the carpenter-bee, the mining caterpillars, the quarrying sea-slugs, execute their work in a way which we cannot rival or excel. The bird is an exquisite architect; the beaver a most skilful bridge-builder; the silk-worm the most beautiful of weavers; the spider the best of net-makers. Each is a perfect craftsman, and each has his tools always at hand. Those wise creatures, I believe, have minds like our own, to the extent that they have minds, and are not mere living machines, swayed by a blind instinct. They will to do one thing rather than another, and do that one thing in different ways at different times. A bird, for example, selects a place to build its nest upon, and accommodates its form to the particular locality it has chosen; and a bee alters the otherwise invariable shape of its cell, when the space it is working in forbids it to carry out its hexagonal plan. Yet, it is impossible to watch these, or others among the lower animals, and fail to see that, to a great extent, they are mere living machines, saved from the care and anxiety which lie so heavily upon us, by their entire contentment with the present, their oblivion of the past, and their indifference to the future. They do invent, they do design, they do exercise volition in wonderful ways; but their most wonderful works imply neither invention, contrivance, nor volition, but only a placid, pleasant, easily rendered obedience to instincts which reign without rivals, and justify their despotic rule, by the infallible happiness which they secure. There is nothing, accordingly, obsolete, nothing tentative, nothing progressive, in the labours of the most wonderful mechanicians among the lower animals. It has cost none of these ingenious artists any intellectual effort to learn its craft, for God gave it to each perfect in the beginning; and within the circle to which they apply, the rules which guide their work are infallible, and know no variation.
No feathered Ruskin appeal's among the birds, to discuss before them whether their nests should be built on the principles of Grecian or Gothic architecture. No beaver, in advance of his age, patents a diving-bell. No glow-worm advocates, in the hearing of her conservative sisters, the merits of new vesta-lights, or improved lucifer-matches. The silk-worms entertain no propositions regarding the substitution of machinery for bodily labour. The spiders never divide the House on the question of a Ten Hours Working Bill.
