1868.] NEWBERRY. — SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 289 



This objection will perhaps be met by the Darwinians with the 

 assertion that the community 3 in fact, constitutes an individual ; 

 but I must confess that I find it difficult to comprehend how the 

 sterility of the workers in ants and bees was ever introduced 

 through the medium of modified descent, the Darwinian method, 

 or how it is kept up from generation to generation among those 

 individuals which have no posterity to inherit their peculiarities 

 of structure. 



The Honey Ants of Mexico offer additional difficulties. Among 

 them a portion of the community secrete honey in the abdominal 

 cavity until they resemble small grapes, and these individuals, 

 during the winter, are despatched in succession to furnish food 

 for the other members of the colony. How, by modified descent, 

 is this honey-making faculty transmitted, when those who possess 

 it are systematically destroyed ? 



A still harder nut for the Darwinians to crack is furnished in 

 a fact stated by Dr. Stimpson, that among the Crustacea, which do 

 not live in communities, a very large proportion of the individuals 

 of a numerically powerful species pass their lives as neuters, or 

 undeveloped females. 



Another element in nature's economy, which at first sight 

 suggests an objection to the Darwinian theory, is that of beauty, 

 which affects others far more than the possessor. This is con- 

 sidered by the Darwinians simply as an attraction to the opposite 

 sex, but as a fact we find that in the larval condition of some 

 insects — a condition in which no propagation is effected — varieties 

 of form and combinations of color exist which appeal to our sense 

 of beauty scarcely less forcibly than in the perfect insects. 



Again, the origin of life is left completely untouched by the 

 Darwinian hypothesis, and so long as the vital principle resists, as 

 it has done, all efforts of theorists and experimenters to brin«- it 

 within the category of material forces^ so long we must regard the 

 world of life as including elements not amenable to the laws which 

 control simple inert matter. 



Upon this question of the origin of life so much is being done 

 and said that you will expect a word of reference to it at my 

 hands, yet little more can be reported as the result of modern 

 research than that the origin of life is as great a mystery as ever. 

 You will all remember how, a few years since, we were startled by 

 the announcement of the discovery of the generation of the Acarus 

 Crossii ; and, while our original distrust of the accuracy of the 

 Yol. III. S No. 4. 



