Darwin s Artificial and Natural Selection 127 



are to save time : for instance, their habit of cutting holes 

 and sucking the nectar at the bases of certain flowers, which 

 with a very little more trouble, they can enter by the mouth. 

 Bearing such facts in mind, it may be believed that under 

 certain circumstances individual differences in the curvature 

 or length of the proboscis, etc., too slight to be appreciated 

 by us, might profit a bee or other insect, so that certain indi- 

 viduals would be able to obtain their food more quickly than 

 others ; arid thus the communities to which they belonged 

 would flourish and throw off many swarms inheriting the 

 same peculiarities." 



Aside from the general criticism that will suggest itself 

 here also, it should be pointed out that even if " certain indi- 

 viduals " of the bees had slightly longer proboscides, this 

 would, in the case of the hive-bees at least, be of no avail, 

 since they do not reproduce, and hence leave no descendants 

 with longer mouth-parts. Of course, it may be replied that 

 those colonies in which the queens produce more of the long- 

 proboscis kind of worker would have an advantage over other 

 colonies not having so many individuals of this sort. It 

 would then be a competition of one colony with another, as 

 Darwin supposes to take place in colonial forms. But whether 

 slight differences of this sort would lead to the elimination 

 of the least well-endowed colonies is entirely a matter of 

 speculation. Since there are flowers with corolla-tubes of 

 all lengths, we can readily suppose that if one kind of flower 

 excluded individuals of certain colonies, they would search 

 elsewhere for their nectar rather than perish. While differ- 

 ent races might arise in this way, the process would not be 

 the survival of the fittest, but a process of adaptation to a new 

 environment. 



We come now to a topic on which Darwin lays much 

 stress : the divergence of character. He tries to show how 

 the " lesser differences between the varieties become aug- 

 mented into the greater differences between species." 



