Such an animal as a newly hatched bird or an insect just set free from the chrysalis is a going concern, a living creature. It is the bearer of wonderfully complex automatic machinery, capable, under the initiating influence of stimuli, of performing instinctive acts. But if this were all we should have no more than a cunningly wrought and self-developing automatic machine. What the creature does instinctively at first it would do always, perhaps a little more smoothly as the organic mechanism settled down to its work--just as a steam-engine goes more smoothly when it has been running for a while; but otherwise the action would continue unchanged. Instinctive behaviour would remain unmodified throughout life. The chick, however, or the imago insect is something more than this. It affords evidence of the accommodation of behaviour to varying circumstances. It so acts as to lead us to infer that there are centres of intelligent control through the action of which the automatic behaviour can be modified in accordance with the results of experience. When, for example, a young chick walks towards and pecks at a ladybird, the like of which he has never before seen, the behaviour may be purely instinctive; and so, too, when he similarly seizes a wasp-larva. Even when he rejects the ladybird or swallows the larva, this may be directly due to unpleasant stimulation in the one case, and pleasant in the other. But when, after a few trials, the chick leaves ladybirds unmolested while he seizes wasp-larvæ with increased energy, he affords evidence of selection based on individual experience. And such selection implies intelligence in almost its simplest expression. We may say, therefore, that, whereas instinctive behaviour is prior to individual experience, intelligent behaviour is the outcome and product of such experience. This distinction is presumably clear enough; and it is one that is based on the facts of observation. But we must not fail to notice that, though the logical distinction is quite clear, the acquired modifications of behaviour, which we speak of as intelligent, presuppose congenital modes of response which are guided to finer issues. We may say, then, that where these congenital modes of response take the form of instinctive behaviour, there is supplied a general plan of action which intelligence particularizes in such a manner as to produce accommodation to the conditions of existence.