7 6 ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



on their outer surfaces, which become entangled in the 

 wool of animals or the clothing of men, and so secure the 

 scattering of the seeds at a distance. These hooks dry up 

 by the time the seeds are ripe, and are nothing but dead hard 

 tissue incapable of receiving any impression. They cannot, 

 then, hand down the effects of their use to the next genera- 

 tion. This is all the more true, since, at the time of their 

 use, they are separated from the plant of which they were a 

 part, and so, of course, can have no effect on the germ cells 

 of that plant. Of course, the dry seed coats can have no 

 vital relation to the little embryo they enclose. 



Again, the instincts of the bees, to which we have already 

 referred, are wonderful. The worker-bees, which are the 

 ones with the remarkable instincts, build the honeycomb, 

 gather and store the honey, feed the young, control the 

 queen, manage the whole hive in fact, with an intelligence, 

 or in accordance with instincts, of the highest order. It is 

 the workers alone who have these wonderful instincts, but the 

 workers are practically sterile, very rarely having offspring; 

 so, apparently, the instincts of the workers cannot have been 

 developed through the inheritance of the effects of use. The 

 workers have no offspring to whom they could hand down 

 their instincts. The workers come from eggs laid by the 

 queen, and it seems to have been natural selection, choosing 

 for survival those hives in which the workers are most intel- 

 ligent, or have the most perfect instincts, that has produced 

 the complex activities of the present beehive. This has 

 been urged by Weismann and others as an example of great 

 development of instinct or intelligence which natural selec- 

 tion alone can have produced. 



Now, while I believe that the remarkable instincts of the 



