Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/300

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

this larva. 1 Just as clearly does the will to escape their enemies manifest itself in the defensive equipment of animals that are the objects of pursuit. Hedgehogs and porcupines raise up a forest of spears; armadillos, scaly ant-eaters and tortoises appear cased from head to foot in armour which is inaccessible to tooth, beak or claw; and so it is, on a smaller scale, with the whole class of Crustacea. Others again seek protection by deceiving their pursuers rather than by resisting them physically: thus the sepia has provided itself with materials for surrounding itself with a dark cloud on the approach of danger. The sloth is deceptively like its moss-clad bough, and the frog its leaf; and many insects resemble their dwelling-places. The negro's louse is black 2 ; so, to be sure, is our flea also; but the latter, in providing itself with an extremely powerful apparatus for making irregular jumps to a considerable distance, trusted to these for protection. We can however make the anticipation in all these arrangements more intelligible to ourselves by the same anticipation which shows itself in the mechanical instincts of animals. Neither the young spider nor the ant-lion know the prey for which they lay traps, when they do it for the first time. And it is the same when they are on the defensive. According to Latreille, the insect bombyx (silkworm) kills the parnope (wasp) with its sting, although it neither eats it nor is attacked by it, simply because the parnope will lay its eggs in the bombyx's nest, and by doing this will interfere with the development of its eggs; yet it does not know this. Anticipations of this kind once more confirm the ideal nature of Time, which indeed always becomes manifest as soon as the will as

1 Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. i. p. 355. [Add. to 3rd ed.]

2 Blumenbach, De humani generis varietati nativa p. 50.; [[w:Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring|Sömmerring], "On the Negro," p. 8.

COMPARATIVE