1894- NEUTER INSECTS AND LAMARCKISM. 93 



different occasion, when the queen is sent forth from the hive and 

 founds a fresh colony ? And what could have thus usefully perverted 

 or modified the sexual instinct to such different aims and ends except 

 Natural Selection ? Why need we suppose that this great ruling 

 factor has entirely ceased to improve or evolve instincts and intelli- 

 gence in neuter insects ever since the period, however remote, when 

 the queens began to lose the all-important instincts and capacities 

 which are now preserved only in the neuters ? 



5. The sterihty of the neuters and its intimate association or 

 correlation with the many important characteristics confined to these 

 sterile insects, obviously cannot have been developed in females 

 while they remained fertile. Such sterility, combined with such 

 perfect development in other directions, must evidently have been 

 evolved by the favoured survival of such queens as produced the 

 most efficient communities. The infertility of neuters shows in the 

 clearest possible manner that important potentialities may arise and 

 become estabhshed in parental germ-plasm without ever being 

 developed in the actual transmitters. 



Besides the difficulty of accounting for complex upward evolution 

 or enlargement of parts in neuters, Mr. Spencer has also to meet the 

 converse difficulty of accounting for equally complex evolution in the 

 direction of a co-ordinated reduction or diminution of parts and 

 instincts. If, as he would have us believe, the one form of evolution 

 is impossible in neuters, the other should be equally so. Mr. Spencer 

 cannot call in panmixia, since he does not admit the reducing power 

 of this factor, but he alleges defective nutrition as a leading cause of 

 downward or degenerative evolution in various organs and instincts 

 in neuters. But we must not confound a merely proximate means 

 with the great over-ruling factor which has utilised and perfected 

 such means as skilfully as man converted rude flints into efficient 

 tools. How could mere quality or quantity of food have proved so 

 wonderfully adaptive in its effects ? How could stinted nutrition fit 

 the neuters so exquisitely for their various tasks in all details, positive 

 and negative ahke ? Must it not have been Natural Selection, rather 

 than poor food, which maintained the health, strength, and efficiency 

 of the poorly-fed neuters and their specially large brain and superior 

 intelhgence, and all such instincts and organs as are requisite for 

 their tasks ? Must not Natural Selection have been the controlling 

 or guiding influence which so advantageously determined what useful 

 modifications should flourish in connection with certain modifications 

 of nutrition, and what useless organs or instincts should dwindle and 

 disappear ? In one species of ants there are tw^o castes of workers, 

 and, in addition to other remarkable differences, the workers in one 

 of these castes are only a third as long as the other, and the head 

 and jaws are reduced to a still greater extent ; which is as if one set 

 of women in a nation were sterilised and reduced to, say, three feet 

 in height by ill-feeding while another class of women were reduced 



