THE QUEEN ANT 299 



ability of the female sex in ants — including under this term both the 

 fertile, or queen phase, and the usually sterile, or worker phase — reaches 

 its clearest expression in the extraordinary range of intraspecific poly- 

 morphism. In certain species, for example in the African driver ants 

 (Dorylii) and American ants of visitation {Ecitorvii), the structural 

 differences between the workers of the smallest caste and the huge queen 

 of the same species are enormous and represent an amplitude of vari- 

 ability in the female sex unequalled in any other organisms. Male 

 ants, on the contrary, exhibit so little variability that it is often diffi- 

 cult, or even impossible, to distinguish the genera of single specimens of 

 this sex. These facts have an important bearing on the views of 

 authors like Brooks and Geddes and Thomson who assume that male 

 animals are more variable than females, and of those authors who have 

 transplanted this hypothesis to the fields of sociology and anthropology. 

 All of these writers maintain a discreet and significant silence on the 

 subject of the social insects. Equally astonishing, however, is the atti- 

 tude of the biometricians, who, priding themselves on the accuracy of 

 their methods and repudiating mere observation and speculation, pro- 

 ceed to an elaborate measurement of the wings of honey-bees and ants 

 for the purpose of ascertaining whether males are more variable than 

 females, when a glance at the personnel of a few ant and termite 

 colonies would convince the most skeptical that there can be no such 

 correlation between sex and variability as that assumed by the above- 

 mentioned authors. If it is clear that the males of many of the higher 

 animals are in certain characters more variable than the cospecific 

 females, it is even clearer that the very opposite is true of the social 

 hymenoptera, while in the termites, or white ants, both sexes seem to be 

 alike variable and polymorphic. 



