INSTINCT AND REASON 345 



Origin of Instincts. 



It is natural to think of instincts as habits that 

 have been handed down from generation to generation 

 till at last they have become petrified. It is impos- 

 sible, in spite of the dearth of direct evidence, to deny 

 that acquired habits may be transmitted, but it is 

 not difficult to show that instincts sometimes have 

 a quite different origin. In a beehive it is the worker 

 bees alone that make the hexagonal cells, shaping them 

 with almost mathematical exactness, and fitting them 

 together in a way that involves the least possible 

 expenditure of wax. These workers arc undeveloped 

 females and leave no descendants, the eggs from 

 which the young bees are born being all laid by the 

 queen bee, whose sole duty is to lay eggs and who 

 never helps in the work of cell-building. Any habit, 

 then, that is formed by the workers cannot possibly be 

 handed down to the next generation. We must, 

 therefore, look elsewhere for the origin of the instincts 

 o( the hive bee. The explanation which Darwin 

 gave was the very simple one that communities of 

 bees which had these three classes, the drones or males, 

 the queens, and the neuter females or workers, throve 

 greatly and multiplied rapidly, whereas in hives in 

 which all the females were both egg-layers and 

 workers, the population gradually dwindled, so that at 

 last the race became extinct. This idea might seem 

 far-fetched had not gardeners produced a similar 

 result with stocks. These flowers are generally 

 duublc and produce no seed, but among them there is 



