642 Wheeler, Some Remarks on Temporary Social Parasitism. 



In the second place, although he admits that I was the first 

 to give expression to a general law, his words, nevertheless, pro- 

 duce the impression that I have simply renamed or revamped 

 certain facts to which he was the first to call attention. Now it 

 is well known that Forel and not Wasmann was the first to 

 explain certain mixed colonies of Formica, etc., as the result of 

 the adoption of a queen of one species by workers of another. 

 Colonies of precisely the same nature as the truncicola-fusca colonies 

 mentioned by Wasmann were, in fact, made know 7 n by Forel in 

 his magnificent ,,Fourmis de la Suisse" long before Wasmann's 

 time. There is, however, a great difference between observing 

 and recording isolated phenomena or even collecting and classifying 

 similar phenomena and discovering the law r which pervades them. 

 And in this case the difference was the greater, because Was- 

 mann had regarded the phenomena as exceptions, as ,,abnormal" 

 or ,,accidental" ; in other words, he had not left them isolated and 

 unexplained, but had saddled them with a misleading interpretation 1 ). 



Let us now endeavor to estimate the observations said by 

 Wasmann to have furnished him ,,long ago" with the conception 

 of temporary social parasitism. During all the years that European 

 ants have been under observation, only four mixed colonies of 

 F. truncicola-fusca seem to have been recorded. One of these, 

 found near Loco. Switzerland, was described by Forel in his 

 ,,Fourmis de la Suisse" (1874, p. 372); a second was found in 1903 

 in Saxony by Zur Strassen (teste Wasmann 1. c. p. 130) and two 

 have been found by Wasrnann in Luxemburg (1900 and 1901). 

 Both of these colonies were in a stage corresponding to the earliest 

 I have described for F. consodans-incerta, and in both cases Was- 

 mann mistook the truncicola female for a female of rufilxtrbix till 

 the middle of August, 1902. One of these colonies has been kept 

 in an artificial nest since April 8, 1901, and the observations on 

 it are the basis of Wasmann's implication that he independently 

 discovered temporary social parasitism as well as the phylogenetic 

 origin of slavery. Twenty pages are required to relate these obser- 

 vations. They are doubtless very valuable, but they are nearly all 

 on myrmecophiles (Atemelex, Loniw-linxa, etc.) and to that extent 

 irrelevant to the question under discussion and merely useful in 

 inflating a few very simple and, in certain respects, inconclusive 

 inferences. The facts concerning this colony may be briefly, and 

 I believe adequately, stated as follows: 



1) The words ,, abnormal" and ,, accidental'' are frequently used by Wasmann 

 when his writing would gain in clearness by their avoidance. Thus I am said 1o 

 lielleve that slavery in ants had a ,,rcin zufallige Entstehung" (p. 2SO), when such 

 a conception never crossed my mind. The presence of fusca workers even as a 

 ,, byproduct" in a sanyuinca nest is not due to ,,pure chance''. 



