WHEELER— ANT LARV^. 333 



the colonies of such regions is treated with any less consideration 

 than in young, previously uninfested colonies in regions where the 

 parasite is common. As Lomechnsa is very rare in England, the ex- 

 periment could be readily performed by shipping a lot of the beetles 

 from the continent to my friend Donisthorpe, with the request that 

 he introduce them to the British sanguinea. I am willing to wager 

 that even if they came from Germany they would be hospitably 

 licked and fed by the ants of Albion. Wasmann might, however, 

 contend that Loniecliusa was once a universal sanguinea parasite 

 or, at any rate, much more abundant and more uniformly distrib- 

 uted than at present, but if this had been the case how could sa7t- 

 guinea have survived, if the ravages of the parasite are as great as 

 he asserts, especially when we consider that sanguinea is itself a 

 parasite on another ant, Formica fusca, and is therefore dependent 

 on a host ? 



The perusal of Wasmann's papers leaves me with the impres- 

 sion that he is bent on showing that symphily is something biolog- 

 ically unique and that for every peculiarity in ant behavior we are 

 bound to postulate a specific instinct. If three of my maiden aunts 

 are fond of pets and prefer cats, parrots and monkeys, respectively, 

 I am not greatly enlightened when the family physician takes me 

 aside and informs me sententiously that my aunt Eliza undoubtedly 

 has an selurophilous, my aunt Mary a psittacophilous and my aunt 

 Jane a pithecophilous instinct, and that the possession of these in- 

 stincts satisfactorily explains their behavior. It is only too appar- 

 ent that the physician has merely called the stimuli that severally 

 affect my aunts by Greek names plus a sufKx indicating " fondness," 

 assumed their existence as entities in my aunts' minds and naively 

 drawn them forth as " explanations." It is high time that such 

 scholastic methods of conducting biological inquiries were aban- 

 doned. Entia non sunt multiplicanda prccter necessitatem in the 

 study of animal behavior as in other fields of research. 



The observations recorded in the opening pages of this paper 

 seem to me to constitute the most formidable argument against the 

 existence of special symphilic instincts, for in the first place, if in 

 the social insects the relations between parent and offspring or be- 

 tween the nursing workers and the offspring of the fertile females 



