Illustrations of instinct deduced from the habits of British animals / By Jonathan Couch.

  • Jonathan Couch
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of instinct deduced from the habits of British animals / By Jonathan Couch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    It is a modern discovery, that a knowledge of the higher orders of natural beings is best obtained by first studying the structure and functions of those creatures which possess the simplest organization, and which are consequently lowest in the order of existence ;—by examining them, in fact, according to the order in which their Author was pleased to call them into being: for thus we reap the advantage of observing functions in action in a simple living being, constituted of no more than a texture or tissue, unmixed with any other organization that might modify or overrule the actions of its living properties. And in making our primary selection of such a living body for the purposes of this study, it is of little importance whether the object of our choice be vegetable or animal; since, though the higher classes of the former, as well as of the latter, possess great complication of structure and function, in the lower families of each, where these apparently very distinct departments of creation approach near to each other in affinity, the line of demarcation be- comes so obscure, and both are in all respects so simple, as to place them much on the same level. It cannot be affirmed of these, that they have any actions, in the usual sense of that word; and their functions are the simplest results of the composition or structure of their tissue, quickened into independent existence by the endowment of life; by which we mean that ultimate principle that to a living entity is what gravity is to a dead mass, but whose real nature has eluded the researches of the inquirer in both cases.
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