INSECT SOCIETIES — LAMEERE. 519 



ence in conditions under which are produced the workers and the 

 perfect females and which removes the conditions under which these 

 last are produced further from those vested in the presocial ancestor, 

 there will be established a wider and wider divergence of characters 

 between the neuters and the queens. 



The case of the domestic bee is extremely suggestive. Here the 

 queen is profoundly different from the workers; these have pre- 

 served nearly all the characters of a female of solitary hymenoptera, 

 while having acquired several new instincts. The queen, on the con- 

 trary, has departed from the ancestral beaten track ; she has lost the 

 pollen-collecting organs, as well as her nursing instincts; her wings 

 are shortened, her sting modified; on the other hand, her genital 

 organs are enormously developed through an extraordinary increase 

 in the number of egg-bearing sheaths, and she is ready to lay eggs a 

 few days after birth. These differences are no longer those of two 

 extreme fluctuations, but rather those of true mutations; they are, 

 however, of trophogenic origin, nourishment entering into the ques- 

 tion here not only as to quantity, but also as to quality. We know, 

 in fact, since the discovery of Schiraz, that the workers can create a 

 queen from a young worker larva which they bring up as a queen 

 larva. Instead of leaving it in a narrow cell and feeding it with a 

 coarse paste, they build for it a large cell, which they fill with the 

 royal jelly, produced from the secretion of their digestive tubes. 



These facts evidently arguing against the opinion of Weismann, 

 we are tempted to extend, with Emery, to the neuters of the ants and 

 also of the termites the ideas which the wasps and the bees teach us. 

 Let us see if this is possible. 



VII. 



Among the ants, as among the termites, it is the normally fertile 

 individuals which, contrary to what is shown by the domestic bee, 

 have preserved the characters of the presocial ancestor, while the 

 neuters have advanced in evolution. The neuters are notably always 

 without wings, and they are especially characterized by a great de- 

 velopment of the head, to the detriment of the abdomen. This 

 feature is connected with the power of the jaws, and it goes on in- 

 creasing with the size, for the workers among the ants and the 

 soldiers among the termites can be divided according to this feature 

 into several categories. The soldiers of the termites constitute a 

 caste entirely distinct from that of the workers, and often very 

 different from the parents, while among the ants the neuters having 

 a maximum size are called soldiers. 



Now Professor Bugnion, of Lausanne, has made an important 

 discovery regarding a termite of Ceylon. The soldier of Eutermes 



