WHEELER— ANT LARV.E. 339 



this connection some of Le Dantec's recent writings are of consid- 

 erable interest. In a footnote (p. 288) at the end of " Les Influences 

 Ancestrales " (1917) he asks : 



Does maternal love, which has assumed such great moral significance 

 in the human species, originate among the females of the Mammalia as the 

 desire (souci) to rid themselves of their milk? 



A similar tendency to show that the social relation in man has an 

 egoistic instead of an altruistic foundation is even more forcibly dis- 

 played in his startling not to say shocking, volume entitled 

 "L'Egoisme Seule Base de Toute Societe" (1916).^^ 



Bibliography. 

 1914. Arnold, G. Nest-Changing Migrations in Two Species of Ants. Proc. 



Rhodes. Sc. Assoc, 13, 1914, pp. 25-32, i pi. 

 1901. Berlese, A. Osservazioni su Fenomeni che avvengono durante la 



Ninfosi degli Insetti Metabolici. Rivist. de Patol. Vcgct., 8, 1901, pp. 



1-155, 6 pis., 42 text-figs. ; 10, 1901, pp. 1-120, 8 pis., 5 text-figs. 



13 Since the foregoing paragraphs were written I have found two quota- 

 tions from Charles Bonnet's " Contemplation de la Nature," which are the 

 more remarkable because they were published in 1764. On p. 213 he says: 

 " In order the better to insure the well-being of their progeny, would not 

 Nature have engaged the affection of the mothers in such a manner that the 

 3'oung would become for them a source of agreeable sensations and material 

 usefulness? Certain facts seem to confirm this conjecture. . . . The mammae 

 have been constructed with such art that the sucking and pressure exerted by 

 the young excite the nerves which impart to these organs a delicate disturb- 

 ance or soft commotion accompanied bj' a feeling of pleasure. This pleasure 

 sustains the natural affection of the mother, if indeed it be not one of its 

 principal causes. The same may be said of the action of licking, which is 

 reciprocal. Finally, mothers are sometimes incommoded by the abundance 

 of their milk ; the young relieve them by sucking." The second quotation (p. 

 272) is even more astonishing in its bearing on the conditions in the social 

 insects : " The neuters [of bees] have no sex and do not reproduce. How can 

 we suppose that they have the same affection for the offspring of their queen 

 as the mothers of other animals? They behave nevertheless in the same 

 manner under the same circumstances. If, therefore. Nature has known how 

 to insure the attachment of mothers by the agreeable sensations derived from 

 their offspring or by the services they render, it would certainly seem that 

 she must employ much the same means in the case of the worker bees and 

 that she has placed in the young a secret source of delectable sensations 

 which attaches them to the workers and induces them to disgorge into the 

 cells the kind of porridge with which the young are nourished." These 

 quotations are from a work entitled " La Psychologic Animale de Charles 

 Bonnet " published in 1909 in Geneva by Ed. Claparede who cites them and 

 the work of Giard in support of his views on the reciprocal relations of the 

 mother to her offspring. 



