1909. Reviews. 239 



the wasp when its cousin the hive -bee gets on perfectly well withoiit 

 it. 



This may be taken as almost an extreme example of the readiness of 

 the authors to overlook important distinctions in the economy of the 

 animals they compare. It is easy to show that the wasp is in far greater 

 need than the bee of some such defence against casual enemies as a 

 warning livery is supposed to afford. The casual enemy, it must be 

 remembered, is not a wholesale destroyer, but one that snaps up an 

 individual now and then, through carelessness or mistake. Now no 

 harm can possibly come to the bee-community through an enemy of 

 this kind. An odd " worker," incapable of producing progeny, is all that 

 would be lost, and the community, if a healthy one, would not miss it. 

 The queen and the young perfect females, immured at home, are free 

 from all risk of being thus snapped up. It is, as everyone knows, far 

 otherwise with the queen-wasp, who flies about freely all through the 

 spring, when any injury to her would entail premature but certain 

 extinction on the community she is about to found. And the difference 

 does not end here. The wasp-colony, even when the workers appear, 

 begins as a small beginning. On the work of the few workers first 

 hatched the lives of the residue yet depend, and the casual enemy, if 

 not warned off by the bright yellow livery of the insects, might still 

 " nip the swarm in the bud." There is no stage analogous to this in the 

 life of the bee-community, which founds itself by migration with its 

 queen in a swarm already strong. Bearing these distinctions in mind, 

 one can hardly reject as a far-fetched supposition the contention that a 

 warning colour may be important to the wasp but cannot be needed by 

 the bee. 



There may, of course, be something in the general objection to warning 

 colour as a product of the selective process, that in its early stages it 

 would be harmful. Still, if we suppose that in the initial stage the 

 animal destined to a warning coloration was merely distasteful or other- 

 wise formidable, and that it had no brilliant tints, there appears to be 

 every ground for inferring that intelligent predaceous creatures would 

 learn to avoid it, as they now do the bee, and we can hardly avoid sup- 

 posing that in doing so they discriminate it, by such markings as it 

 possessed, from other creatures more or less allied to it but not formidable 

 or distasteful. An advantage would almost certainly accrue, in such 

 cases, to those individuals in which the markings in question were 

 exceptionally vivid — provided that they did not go at a bound beyond 

 all recognition, in which case difficulties might, no doubt, arise. On 

 what the authors call the Wallaceian view, it would seem that the more 

 distinct such markings became the better they would serve this use, so 

 that in course of time they might, without ever having been harmful, 

 develop into conspicuous and even gaudy patterns. This is not intended 

 as a denial of the possible origin of many of these conspicuous colours 

 through mutation. But we suggest that it is to cases of origin through 

 mutation that the objection urged by the authors would most strongly 

 apply. The animal would then have suddenly assumed all the dis- 

 advantages of increased conspicuousness, without the compensating 



