^^^"" THE NEW EVOLUTION T~^^ 



the conclusion that mental alertness and ingenuity 

 wherever it is found is developed as an offset to some 

 physical weakness in the animals involved. This 

 physical weakness usually has to do with helpless 

 younger stages, as in the social and other insects and 

 in the birds and rodents, but it may involve the later 

 stages, as the inactive helpless pupal stage of those 

 insects having such a stage, all stages in the termites, 

 and the hibernation period in rodents. 



Thus physical weakness in the animal world is 

 counterbalanced by the appearance of mental attri- 

 butes comparable with, or at least parallel to, those of 

 man, and the more pronounced the weakness the more 

 man-like do these attributes become. 



No one can deny that at the present time the insects 

 are the most formidable competitors of man. There 

 are more than three times as many different kinds of 

 insects as there are of all other types of animal life 

 taken together. Among the insects by far the most 

 numerous, both in kinds and in number of individuals, 

 are those forms, as the ants, bees, wasps and their 

 allies, flies and moths, and many beetles (fig. lo, 

 p. xi), which have weak and feeble worm-like young. 

 They are the most successful and resourceful of the 

 insects. They include the largest as well as the 

 smallest of all the insect species, but their average 

 size is considerably less than that of other insects. 



Among the mammals the dominant type at the 

 present day is the rodent type, and especially the 

 murine or rat-like rodents. Here again we find as the 

 dominant group, most numerous both in species and 



Us] 



